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Insights and Heresies Pertaining 

to the 
Evolution of The Soul 



Insights and Heresies 

Pertaining To 

The Evolution of The Soul 



By 



is 



AMMYEETIS (Persian) 



THE) CHRISTOPHER PRESS 
BOSTON 

1913 







Copyright igij 
The Christopher Press 



# 



/<*-€> 



0CLA358K 



d . 



DEDICATION. 

To those heroic minds who can truly say: 

"My soul is my own," and bravely maintain it 

through everything — in spite of Church or 

State — I do offer with earnest congratulations 

and my loving greetings, these fragmentary 

thoughts of 

Ammyeetis. 



Our revered Emerson loaned his Plato to a 
neighbor. Meeting him some time afterward 
he said to him: "How did you like Plato?" 
"Very much," the farmer answered, "very 
much indeed. I see he has a great many of my 
idees." And so, my readers — if there be such — 
there may be herein set forth some of your own 
familiar thoughts which you may not have found 
opportunity to express in such guise as appears 
in this small book. 



CONTENTS. 

No New Thing 7 

Evolution 8 

Slowness of Evolution 14 

The Work of Nature 16 

A New Science 16 

World Making 17 

Imperfections Revealed 19 

World Origin 19 

Spirit Individualized through Matter . . 21 

World Signs . 21 

World Growth 25 

Death a Benefactor 27 

World Progress 27 

The Origin of Evil 30 

Vibration 33 

Life 34 

Churches Money Makers 36 

Life in Nature 38 

Heaven 41 

Nature Spirits 42 

Experience 45 

Spiritualism 45 

Phenomena 47 

Mediumship 50 

The Migrations of our Eace 51 



n CONTENTS 

The Discipline of Life 52 

Homogeneity of the Eace 53 

Of God 56 

Of Jesus 58 

The Gods 59 

Knowledge of Occult Law 61 

Evanescence of Mere Beliefs .... 62 

The Fount of Inspiration for All ... 63 

Man versus Death 63 

Fear of Death 68 

Test of Character 71 

Character Forming 72 

Man the Final Earth Product .... 73 

Superstitions 74 

Self -Justice 76 

Symbolism 77 

Love 77 

Ideals of Love 80 

The Needs of Woman 84 

Man versus "Woman 86 

Natural Cruelty of the Undeveloped . . 89 

The Worst Sin . . 90 

Reincarnation 90 

Processes of Reincarnation ..... 93 

Education of Children ...... 97 

Egotism 98 

Responsiveness 100 

Hell . 101 

The Commonplace 102 

Petroleum 105 

Law 107 



CONTENTS III 

Communism 108 

Happiness 110 

Pain Ill 

Foes in the Household 112 

The Inner Life . 113 

Boot of Evils 114 

Best in Change 115 

Miserliness 117 

Special Providence ....... 117 

Human Destiny 119 

Ethical Law 123 

Human Life 126 

Animal Likeness 127 

Natural Superstition 128 

Adaptiveness of Man 130 

Devil Worship 132 

Fanaticism 133 

Truth 135 

Christs 139 

Hero Worship 139 

Eeason 141 

Sympathy 142 

New Eeligions 143 

The Growth Processes of the Human Soul 145 

Necessitv for Phenomena 147 

Will . 149 

Change of Atoms 150 

Our Limitations 150 

Final Race Experience 151 

Religious Performances . . . . . 152 

Of Teachers 153 



IV CONTENTS 

Wise Use of Money 154 

Genius 155 

Thoughts Are Things 156 

Unfoldment 157 

Inventions 158 

Divine Healing . 159 

Surplus 160 

Analysis of the Lord's Prayer .... 161 

Absurd Beliefs 167 

The Eesurrection 168 

The Creator 172 

Eetributive Justice 172 

The Soul 177 

Woman 179 



Insights and Heresies 

Pertaining to 

The Evolution of The Soul 



NO NEW THING. 

There is no new revelation to be given to man ; 
there is no need of it. Those who have labored 
most strenuously to evolve from their inner con- 
sciousness a new, a better religion, have found 
themselves bogged in the mire of their egotism 
which has landed them in a police court, or they 
have been confronted by exactly the same prob- 
lems as those from which they have sought to 
escape. Few, indeed, have survived the test of 
time. There is an ancient promise that stands 
yet for man's use: "To him that hath (im- 
proved) shall more be given, and from him that 
hath not (improved) shall be taken away that 
which he already has. ' ' This was never meant 
to apply to material things — it could not — it 
was spoken in reference to the gift of under- 
standing, and of using the occult, the psychic 
law. Many psychics have lost their spiritual 
gifts through failing to understand that endless 
progress is the law that forces souls along the 
way of life. No stopping by the way to gather 

7 



8 INSIGHTS AND HEBESIES 

shells upon the shore, no aimless looking back; 
but work with stout heart and resolute will. It 
all means work, overmastering habits of thought 
and action, lifting the soul from the grooves of 
heredity, and in all ways making aspiration 
attract the inspiration that sustains the soul. 

EVOLUTION. 

All subjects pertaining to our knowledge of 
the soul are too subtle to be weighed and proved 
by external intellect alone. Our lives are ruled 
by such a hotch-potch of inherited beliefs and 
tendencies, that it is almost impossible for us 
to use any discrimination concerning them; or 
to arraign ourselves before the tribunal of our 
own better judgment in such manner as to 
enable us to separate the false and effete ethical 
and religious influences, from the wise and true, 
which alone are abiding and permanent. 

Thus we grope and stumble along through our 
earthly lives, burdened with ideas which were 
set in motion far back in a crude age, and which 
were so well adapted to their time that they 
still vibrate to the tendencies of our own day. 
This applies to every department of human ex- 
perience, and were it not that we are, as a huge 
family, better than our cherished beliefs, higher 
in the scale of development than these would 
seem to indicate, we should still be under the 
dominion of the so-called "Dark Ages." The 



UBHnHHHBHHB&HilHUHII 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 9 

most important and the dearest phase of human 
experience must come, of course, through its 
religious beliefs, and as they are narrow and 
superstitious, on the one hand, or grand with 
faith and understanding of law, on the other, 
do we judge of the status of the individual, the 
community, and the race; and the advances 
made upon this line mark the progress of what 
we term civilization on this planet. 

There is no time so trying, so full of agony to 
the soul, as is that hour when it first begins to 
doubt the absolute, unquestionable truth of the 
creeds it has hitherto blindly accepted, and in 
which it has fully believed. Creeds are the 
swaddling clothes of the soul, and must inevit- 
ably be outgrown and laid aside as the mind of 
man grows more and more capable of compre- 
hending the truth which is to set it free from the 
trammels of mere blind belief. 

It is so comfortable to have our spiritual faith 
ready made for us, our paths all mapped out, 
and our final destiny made plain and sure, pro- 
vided only that we remain faithful in our 
adherence to them as they are set forth by our 
parents and spiritual guardians, that when the 
great, ever-surging, resistless tidal wave of 
progress first reaches the soul, it can only stand 
in dumb agony, like one upon the seashore 
watching its last hope go down beneath the 
waste of mighty waters. Torn from its anchor- 
age of inherited beliefs, it is sure to be tempest- 



10 INSIGHTS AND HEBESIES 

tossed, rent and torn, buffeted by conflicting 
tendencies, cast upon many a desert island of 
unfaith, and haunted by miserable doubts and 
black despair, ere it hears and heeds the pilot 
of truth, the only guide to the peaceful haven of 
eternal life. Happy, indeed, are they who tarry 
not upon the weary way; but who have within 
them that aspiration, that endless cry for light, 
which shall always, in G-od's providence, compel 
the needed response and guidance; for many 
honest, earnest men and women, lacking this 
attribute of the soul, fail all through life to 
reach this only true solution of the riddle of 
human existence. Kind and sincere friends 
say of them : ' ' Oh ! if they had only remained 
faithful to the religion of their fathers, they 
would have found happiness and peace." But 
the law of evolution brings each and every soul 
to the point where it must stand alone with 
God, there to discover and establish its relation- 
ship to the Divine, irrespective of all precon- 
ceived ideas and notions, superstitions, and 
ignorance. This is exactly what every soul 
must come to — the aggregation of powers and 
forces of body and soul resulting in the fully 
developed and rounded-out individuality of any 
given personality. These are the rare and 
unusual men and women, the fully flowered out, 
the richest fruitage of any and all races, and it 
is to these that we must look for that union of 
sympathy with and comprehension of the needs 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 11 

and requirements of all which is to usher in the 
reign of peace, and universal good will on earth. 

Jesus of Nazareth went before us on the path, 
the only way cast up for earnest souls to walk 
in. There has never been given to the world 
any system of ethics superior to his. He rec- 
ognized the homogeniety of the race — "Each 
for all, all for each," was the whole import of 
his teachings. In him was epitomized the 
experience of the race. Each and every soul 
must wear its crown of thorns, and bear its 
cross and suffer crucifixion, ere the soul astray 
from God, immersed in, and overwhelmed by 
matter, can be forced to relinquish its hold on, 
its love for the external, material things per- 
taining to this world. But it has to be, it cer- 
tainly must be, the experience of every creature 
born of woman. Be sure, soul! if none of 
these experiences have ever been realized by 
you, that you are but just now entering upon 
the inevitable rounds which must attend your 
connection with, and relationship to this earthly 
sphere of being. Such are as the insensate clod, 
having as yet neither spiritual sense, nor moral 
responsibility. Nature's processes are slow; 
but be sure that the goal is appointed, and that 
G-od will be there and will wait till we come. 

When Jesus said : i i The poor ye have always 
with you, ' ' he did not refer to dollars and cents 
only, but to that poverty of intellect, that bar- 
renness of the moral nature which makes a 



12 INSIGHTS AND HEKESIES 

human being a reproach and a terror to his 
kind. These we shall always have to deal with, 
to educate if we can, to constrain from overt 
acts of evil, and to protect ourselves from in all 
the works and ways of life. 

So painful and slow is the process of charac- 
ter-forming that millions of souls pass on from 
this sphere of life to the spirit world so lacking 
in individuality that they have no more power 
for any expression of themselves upon that 
plane of being than they had when they were 
living here. Not as much, in fact, for the phy- 
sical body and brain have always some possible 
function and use while they hold their relation- 
ship to the world of material life, which func- 
tion and use are laid aside when they are put 
through the sifting process of physical death, 
and in all cases, unless the powers of the ego as 
exercised here are supplanted by a sufficient 
growth of the spiritual nature to sustain the ego 
in its new relationship, and give to it the im- 
petus needed to start it forward upon lines of 
usefulness and growth, it naturally fails to 
waken to any sort of realization of itself and its 
possible career in its new life. This is spe- 
cially true of those persons who have been 
psychologized by those teachings which relegate 
the souls of human beings to the cold clasp of 
the ground, until the expected day of judgment ; 
or of those poor, overworked men and women to 
whom heaven seems only a place to sleep and 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 13 

rest in; or again, of still another class of minds 
that has brought itself to a belief in utter ex- 
tinction after the close of this external life. 
These are the "shades," the "shells" we hear 
of, for there are times when the subtle inner 
sense of these sleeping ones is stirred to action 
by the wails of the loving, longing ones left on 
earth to mourn; and, as is the case with one in 
somnambulic sleep, the spirit walks and talks, 
in response to the demands of friends, through 
those persons who are gifted with the aura 
necessary for the medial agency. These excur- 
sions of the soul into the realm of matter, thus 
made by and through the offices of clairvoyants 
and seers, the repeated arousings of the ego 
from its contented sleep are finally highly educa- 
tional, and result in resurrecting the forces of 
the enfranchised being, and setting them in 
motion on the lines of useful work for humanity. 
For this medial service which is thus being 
rendered to the spirit world by such gifted per- 
sons still living here in the body, multitudes are 
daily and hourly expressing their gratitude and 
appreciation. 

We have somewhat abolished our old, long- 
established Hell, and now, to be consistent, we 
must also do away with our preconceived ideas 
of a Heaven of eternal rest ; for why should the 
souls of men be wrapped in useless slumbers, 
until the strong overwhelming influence of the 
law of progress sweeps them up like dry leaves 



14 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

before a whirlwind, and rushes them along to 
the gates of a conscious life, through a new 
relationship upon the physical plane? The 
spirit does not weary, and when the exhausted 
body is laid aside, why not enlist the services of 
all to whom any appeal can be made? Thus 
shall we all be growing together, and Death 
shall be forced to cast aside its grim and dread- 
ful seeming and show for the angel it is. Ah ! 
how could we go on and on in the narrow limita- 
tions of this small beginning of a life, if Nature 
did not kindly call a halt somewhere on the 
road, while we, taking fresh courage, start out 
in our new career with our entire being adjusted 
to laws which are working in harmony with the 
divine will. 

SLOWNESS OF EVOLUTION. 

There have been times in the lives of all soul- 
grown people when the inner consciousness has 
clearly perceived that some given experience 
may mean an important crisis in the expression 
of their individual character. But not frequent- 
ly, in the ordinary lives of human beings, do 
they meet up with really great events, or per- 
sonal experiences that create for them special 
overturnings of their ideas, or any change of 
personal habits. To the mind of youth, life 
seems a plainly simple, straight-forward way; 
but when overtaken by results of unconsidered 



EVOLUTION" OF THE SOUL 15 

actions, for which there has been no prepara- 
tion, there dawns upon it the consciousness of 
appalling vistas, and visions of future possibili- 
ties that are overpowering. 

As we journey forward on the path of exist- 
ence, life becomes ever more and more compli- 
cated, and the need, the overwhelming demand 
for an understanding of the ever-varying prob- 
lems presented to the mind for consideration, 
and the constantly urgent necessity for wise 
decisions must call into action all our highest 
powers of the intellect and reason, in order to 
secure to us the best results from the opportun- 
ities given us to acquire knowledge. Every 
one of our experiences are bits in the mosaic of 
our lives, and without them the picture would 
be incomplete. 

But with all, we are forced to realize how un- 
finished and unsatisfactory are nearly all of our 
experiences of earthly existence. It is, indeed, 
"a thing of shreds and patches." But we are 
caught in the web of material existence from 
which there can be no lawful escape, save by un- 
premeditated physical death. We are thrust 
into the seething cauldron of formative life. 
The entire race of man, forced forward by the 
resistless power of the law of progress, is on 
the everlasting journey to the heights of per- 
fected being. To us, enmeshed in the ties of 
interest and affection, the various heredities 
and the worldly Karmas which hold us fast, the 



16 INSIGHTS AND HEEESIES 

slow, unnumbered processes of evolution on this, 
our home world, as recorded in history seem 
unendurably long. But time is naught — eternity 
is unending — and "ten thousand years are but 
as a day with God," the great Maker and 
Moulder of our immortal souls. 

THE WOEK OF NATURE. 

The planet itself is stirred to its very centre. 
On one side, the earth opens its horrible maw 
and swallows up uncounted numbers of her 
children, or spews out her molten interior in 
vast lava tides, overwhelming and destroying 
all within their reach. At the opposite side, 
great floods of gas and rock oil, set free by the 
operation of the drill, shoot up in the air and 
fall back upon the soil in a luminous spray, as 
like to liquid gold as aught not filled with the 
beloved auriferous metal could be. The waters 
loosed from their fastnesses over-reach their 
accustomed bounds, and great tidal waves are 
encountered in unexpected latitudes. Nature is 
rounding up her great circle, and making condi- 
tions for a new era. 

A NEW SCIENCE. 

A science of Spiritual evolution could be 
erected, based upon the teachings and ethics of 
Jesus Christ, that would put souls consciously 



■—■■■■—■ ■■■■■■■■■■I 



EVOLUTION" OF THE SOUL 17 

in their true rank and grade, and make them 
known just as people are recognized by the col- 
lege curriculums from which they have grad- 
uated. 

WOBLD MAKING. 

The "fire-mist" and the mephitic vapors 
were finally swept away; another era was pre- 
paring. Incorporate in the world substance of 
which the planet was made were the seeds and 
germs of all life. Its crude material was made 
manifest in the prodigious vegetable growths, 
and the awful corresponding animal life. Birds 
and beasts and reptiles, each one more hideously 
terrible than the others, filled the air, the earth 
and the waters of the earth with the abounding 
life of these horrible creatures. Into this unac- 
countable menagerie came also the foreshadow- 
ing of man — a huge hairy creature possessing 
size and power to do battle with his animal com- 
peers for supremacy in the seething, upgrowing 
land. 

This was only the differentiation of the 
animal-man from the animal per se — the begin- 
ning of the form which stood upon its hind 
legs. From such rudimentary forms was 
evolved intelligence which finally begot the 
human soul. This, after vast ages, grew into a 
state and condition through which spirit could 



18 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

manifest, and the human race was finally started 
on its endless earthly career. 

With the birth of the sonl came what we call 
the religious instinct, and man began to worship 
natural objects; animals and reptiles, the sun 
and finally, superior personalities were thought 
to be gods. The "phallic worship," worship 
of the human organs of creative power, gave the 
males great prominence. The female, woman, 
the mere matrix was considered, from the first, 
of far less importance. No one stopped to 
think, what is one without the other in the great 
world processes. 

Nature, ever on the alert so as not to lose any 
and every possible representation of her power, 
buried here and there specimens of her handi- 
work, and the exhumed remains of prehistoric 
monsters are even now being restored and 
labelled with such titles as our modern scientists 
have been able to invent to somewhat describe 
the size, the form, and the habits of these long 
extinct manifestations of the beginnings of life 
on this earth. 

Among these, too, have also been found the 
bones of huge human-like beings whose decadent 
progeny are still alive in limited number. 

The gorilla is still the terror of some of the 
wild places of the earth; as he booms his way 
through the impenetrable forests, he sends forth 
his note of warning, beating his great hairy 
breast, and all living things flee before him. 



m 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 19 

Fancy what the awful first man — his progenitor 
— must have been ! Science has never yet been 
able to discover the probable length of time it 
required for this crude age to endure in order 
to lay the foundation of the world ; for time was 
not, and existence was recorded only by ages 
and aeons. But seven times their infernal 
progeny were nearly all swept off the planet by 
awful cataclysms and the whole affair had to be 
begun over again. 

IMPERFECTIONS REVEALED. 

The soul digs deep into the age-long deposits 
of knowledge, the results of countless experi- 
ences, and brings up the Real. 

This has to be, the most successful egotist, the 
most deluded hypocrite must inevitably meet up 
with himself some day and begin to know the 
truth versus make-believe. 

All souls are so veiled in the flesh, and held by 
the crowding necessities of their lives, that it is 
only on rare, unexpected occasions that the in- 
dividual soul can throw down the barriers and 
show of what it is capable. 

WORLD ORIGIN. 

To be able to understand, even to our limited 
degree, something of our origin, and the pur- 
pose of our existence is most comforting and 



20 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

sustaining. In the beginning, the Creator sent 
to this planet a given number of beings intended 
for the exemplification of the law of evolution 
and soul growth. In the everlasting rounds of 
human life, no new souls are being created and 
sent here to work out their salvation through 
their experiences incident to the life of this 
young planet, earth. What appears to our 
limited perception to be the beginning of new 
lives is so only in relation to their present 
embodiment. All new souls now being born 
here are but returning from some other phase 
of existence. The whole human race is one 
family. Bound to the wheel of life, every in- 
dividual soul must pass through all of the varied 
experiences that are set for its evolution. 
What they are not today, they have been, or must 
become. But not all people march over just the 
same highway to reach the soul's status. De- 
tails of experience do not count. It is the lesson 
learned, and practically applied that forwards 
the unfoldment of the individual in a compre- 
hension and understanding of God's eternal 
truth. Only results in all things, temporal and 
spiritual, attest the unfoldment and growth of 
each and every soul. 

It is only when man has evolved to the point of 
being more than a man, ' l a little lower than the 
angels," that the higher spheres of activity are 
necessary for his further progress. To expect 
to develop in the worlds of finer substance than 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 21 

that of earth before he has learned all that 
earthly experiences can teach him, is like "plac- 
ing a child in the higher classes of a school 
before he has mastered the lessons of the 
lower. ? ' 

SPIRIT INDIVIDUALIZED THROUGH 

MATTER. 

As spirit per se has no entity, and only 
evolves individuality through its relationship 
with matter ; and has no other conscious expres- 
sion; the so long-talked-of "Fall of man" was 
not a fall downward, but it was a process up- 
ward, necessary to his being, to his existence as 
man. 

WORLD SIGNS. 

Our planet, true to her everlasting record, has 
put forth her potent reorganizing power to cele- 
brate the ushering in of the new era. 

Not less marvelous are the signs and indica- 
tions of great changes taking place upon the 
visible planes of the lives of men. Hand in 
hand march the visible and the imponderable 
forces of this earthly life. Ignorance and vapid 
superstitions can no longer block the doorway 
of the living Christ. 

God wills to know, and be known of his own, 



22 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

and to hold his love a free gift to all races of 
men. 

The trump of recollection and of recognition 
has sounded. The dead have already risen, all 
along the lines, and no power can hale them back 
to their dreams. 

Onward, ever upward points the finger of 
progress. Long hoarded wisdom and knowl- 
edge of the forces of nature are pouring into 
the minds of seers, and of wizards of science; 
and these long separated and divorced streams 
are evoluting to the unison of material and 
occult sciences, which is destined to bring in the 
reign of peace and prosperity to all the peoples 
of the earth, and to bring to light the relics of 
past ages, cunningly hidden away in the vast 
womb of nature that they might be preserved 
and brought forth to our knowledge in these 
later days. By the undeniable record yielded 
up from buried cities and storied crypts, and in 
the skeletons of mummies of both animals and 
men of those most ancient times, she is showing 
us where she began the present cycle, now clos- 
ing in about the race, with great clattering of 
forces and profound portents in earth and sky. 

The equilibrium of the universe is maintained 
by the transition of its forces. Atlantis, ma- 
tured and ripened, sinks beneath the sea, and 
her accumulated wealth of wisdom and knowl- 
edge is transferred to other continents to arise 
at the appointed time to enrich and bless the 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 23 

land of their adoption ; and all art and science is 
but shining today in the reflected, reawakened 
light of past ages. 

In view of the revelations being made on all 
sides, we may well reiterate Solomon's wise say- 
ing: " There is nothing new under the sun." 
There can be nothing absolutely new. There is 
only endless iteration and readjustment of 
powers and forces to fit the need of the day and 
generation. 

Nature buffets her children bitterly and wipes 
out her surplus of human life as she destroys 
the overproduction of beast and bird, of insect 
and reptilian life. She inspires the minds of 
men with an overmastering desire for posses- 
sions. She hides her wealth in inaccessible 
places and sets her jealous, invisible forces to 
guard and determinedly hold all possible 
avenues of approach to them. But this world 
was given to man to conquer and own and make 
much of; and the glitter of a speck of useful 
metal in a stray boulder in the lonely canon ; or 
the chance outcropping of rock which to the 
practised eye denotes the nearness of the de- 
posit of oil — these, or any of the thousand and 
one signs, she hangs out along the path in which 
man is destined to march on his way to absolute 
sovereignty, set his forces of intellect and will 
in motion, and he will never rest from his labors 
until he stands upon the pinnacles of the gods, 



24 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

the crowned monarch of all nature's forces on 
this planet. 

All phenomena are negative, and are only the 
external garniture of the world of man, the 
spirit, the child of the Eternal, of the father and 
mother Creators of him. Thus man is, by abso- 
lute inheritance, the king, and the ruler over all 
nature. But not without effort can he enter 
and possess and maintain his power over his 
own. Ice and frosts, and searing sun, and lonely 
wilds, and trackless wastes, and countless 
waters, and evil beasts, and horrible reptiles 
— all, all he must encounter and set at naught 
in his trackless journey. Carefully must he 
force the wilderness to bloom, and by his wise 
efforts "make glad the waste places" of the 
earth. "Wherever the foot of man has been set, 
there is it "hallowed ground." Whatever may 
have been his intent or whatever his fate, in his 
wake shall surely follow the manifest purpose 
of that ever-ruling Power which led him. 
Everywhere along the way, Nature trails her 
loose ends, well baited, with which to catch the 
unwary, and the whitening bones of the lonely 
emigrant family lost on the plains, and the 
snowy hair of the dead mountaineer bleaching 
on high summits or woven in the nests of birds, 
or the bodies of dead mariners, or the lonely 
corpse of the treacherously slain, pulsing with 
the tide on foreign shores, or the miners in their 
pits, forced by the deadly "damps" from all 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 25 

visible connection with Imman life, or the child 
of a superior race held captive by savages, or 
the beautiful white girl sold into the harem of 
a barbarous sultan, or any or all other of such 
expressions of destiny in the isolated lives of 
men are but pioneering the way of the race to 
complete homogeneousness and unquestioned 
ownership of the whole wide earth. 

WORLD GROWTH. 

All of nature's processes are slow and always 
evolutionary. The controlling laws are subtle 
and secret and can never be comprehended or 
understood save as they work out in visible 
results. There is every indication that it has 
required an illimitable series of ages to evolve 
even the physical form of man in the unnum- 
bered races of the human family from the first 
semi-human life to man as we see him now — 
clever and strong of brain and will, daring 
and equal to great emergencies, and in inven- 
tive, creative and executive gifts a very god of 
power and might. The laws of evolution refer 
primarily to the individual planet, Earth, and 
include all that it contains — in a word, all things 
in any way related to it. Mineral deposits and 
crumbling rocks nourish the vegetable world; 
the vegetable world provides sustenance to the 
animal kingdom, and it, in turn, with all the 
others combined, sustains all human life : but its 



26 INSIGHTS A1STD HERESIES 

real root, its permanent existence, is in the 
planet itself. Each and all of these diverse 
manifestations of law coordinated, constitute 
the mysterious modes and methods of the evolu- 
tion of life from the lower to the higher status 
of being, and it works on, and ever on eternally, 
till human life finds its completion and satisfac- 
tion in the fulfillment of the law which merges 
the advanced and prepared soul in the Uni- 
versal Spirit and crowns its final evolution with 
its at-one-ment with its Creator. 

Nature does not duplicate her handiwork, but 
cunningly sets her sign on every leaf and branch 
to insure individuality. She throws protecting 
arms around all her growing life of fruit and 
vegetable in order that each shall reproduce of 
its own kind, and thus keep intact the orderly 
succession, and that there shall be no lack of 
nourishment for the children of men. 

She gives without stint to all the peoples of 
the earth her world-stuff to be worked over into 
human flesh, and animal fibre. But no tiniest 
grain of her possessions has ever, or will ever 
escape from her hand, and the daily debris from 
all earth-made bodies is her constant toll. 
When the forms are set free from the life prin- 
ciple which has pervaded them in their earthly 
career, the circle is rounded, and when the 
grave-rite, dust to native dust we here restore 
to our great mother is uttered, she is the gainer ; 
for the operation of thus passing the material 



EVOLUTION" OF THE SOUL 27 

of which the planet is made through the highest 
created forms of life, brings it into a certain 
relationship to spirit, and thus the evolution, 
the spiritualization of the world-stuff of the 
planet itself is going forward. 

DEATH A BENEFACTOR. 

Death is a benefactor to the human race. 
How could we bear the burden of existence if 
Nature did not somewhere on the march "call 
a halt" while the angels of dissolution tenderly 
unloose our burdens of pain and sorrow, and 
disappointment, and stultifying regrets, and 
remorses for past ill doings and shortcomings ? 

WORLD PROGRESS. 

It is known only to the lesser gods, who keep 
the celestial "accounts," how many times the 
swaggering, bully : ragging, brawling, piratical, 
and murderous human family has swept around 
this globe. Here and there relics of their 
status, their growth in the external, material 
conditions of life are being exhumed, wrung 
from the faithful clasp of Mother Earth, to 
excite the wonder of the day and time. Many 
of the attributes of these lost races, their arts 
and their religions, have come to light; but 
whence they came, and how they perished, is an 
unsolved mystery. From the processes of dis- 



28 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

integration — earthquakes, and widespread 
volcanic action — now going on, we can readily 
conceive of the manner in which vast multitudes 
of humanity have been removed from this planet 
to make room for still other races and peoples. 
The great pilgrimage still goes on. Unnum- 
bered hordes following the secret instinct of 
evolution, unceasingly press forward from the 
East toward the setting sun. This same army, 
in a former incarnation, went forth over the 
land where they lived to slay and exterminate ; 
in this embodiment, here in America, they hew 
out the rocks, and toil in the mines. They har- 
vest the grain that is to feed the hungry multi- 
tude that is speeding on toward this new land as 
fast as the modern conveniences can fetch them. 
Thus they serve instead of destroying humanity 
— a great advance toward civilization. 

There has been, there will always be an un- 
varying round of tearing down and upbuilding 
in the whole wide realm of nature. Nothing, 
not the tiniest grain or the most ponderous 
production of skilled hands, ever stands still. 
All things are in vibration, and their perma- 
nency depends wholly upon the rate of vibratory 
motion. Here and there all the way along, 
from the earliest times of which there has been 
any record, great souls have blossomed out, and 
have carried aloft the God-given light of intel- 
ligence and culture. These inspired minds, 
great souls, have persisted in announcing their 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 29 

message to a darkened world, often in the face 
of direct want and persecutions ; misunderstood 
and maligned, they were and are the saviors of 
the people of this undeveloped planet. Even 
yet, they are known and valued by but a limited 
number of supposedly intelligent people. While 
these inspired light-bringers were seeking to 
shed abroad in the minds of men the truths that 
shall make men free, the Church was devoted to 
closing, and holding fast shut every avenue of 
the human mind that might have a tendency to 
teach the people anything outside of their 
tenets which were the outcome of their weird 
imaginations. If anything could cause a doubt 
to arise in the Creative Mind as to the wisdom 
of letting loose on this small planet the pes- 
tiferous peoples that have swarmed over and 
possessed it, it must have been aroused by 
their demoniacal performances in the name of 
religion, that have disgraced the nature of man 
from the beginning of our knowledge of the 
world. While a perception of beauty and har- 
mony is latent in the minds of men, it is the last 
of the attributes of the soul to develop. The 
figured semblances of God, hewn out of stone or 
wood by the primitive races, are mostly hideous 
inventions of the evil thoughts of evil minds. 
From the terrifying African God, "Mumbo- 
Jumbo," to the artistic bronze representations 
of the Deity of the nations of the East all are 
marked with awe-enforcing ferocity and ugli- 



30 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

ness, instead of by the soul-inspiring lineaments 
of love and beauty. Tremblingly the minds of 
men have groped their way along through the 
mazes of ignorance and enforced darkness to a 
degree of personal liberty; and every picture 
painted, every bit of sculpture achieved in the 
interest of harmony and beauty is testimony to 
the persistency of the inspiration vouchsafed to 
man of the Creator's love of beauty, and of the 
final state of harmony to be reached by human- 
ity. 

THE ORIGIN OF EVIL. 

"All evil is only undeveloped good" has come 
to be the "shibboleth" of not only the Spirit- 
ualists, but of many other of the latter-day cults. 

It sounds fine, beautiful, and is — Praise Grod ! 
— in a large sense, true. It is a beautiful reac- 
tion from the ancient blasphemy taught by the 
priests and pastors anent hell and the devil. 
The comforting belief that the above quoted 
statement settles the whole matter is accepted 
and believed in. Since the supposed dethrone- 
ment of "Auld Hornie," as the Scotch named 
him, as head devil, it has not been thought neces- 
sary to give the matter much if any considera- 
tion. 

Mediums, especially, have gladly ignored the 
fact of the possibility of there often being in 



EVOLUTION" OF THE SOUL 31 

their seances the very presence of potent and 
powerful evil influences. 

Spiritualism has flung wide the doors and 
given ignorant, and undeveloped humanity an 
equal opportunity with the refined, and good to 
express themselves. It is thus the only truly 
democratic religion ever made known on this 
planet! It recognizes all human beings, good 
and bad, as the children of one and the same 
Father, and that not one can be lost from the 
hand of God! 

The peculiar people who have developed the 
strange power of mediatorship between this 
material world and the plane of existence known 
as the spiritual world have always been helped 
and sustained in their great work by their in- 
visible friends and appointed spirit guardians, 
or they could never have carried forward their 
important mission to the people of this earth. 

Regardless of all the efforts of the enemies 
and traducers of Spiritualism, the spread of the 
knowledge of the unfolding spiritual philosophy 
has been and is marvelous; and the establish- 
ment of the fact of man's existence, continued 
after physical death, through varied phenom- 
ena, is in itself the proof of its being the work, 
not of Satan, but of a beneficent God. And why 
not? The Creator of us all must know his 
earth-children's needs for their further evolu- 
tion and growth ! 

There have been great searchings, at various 



32 INSIGHTS AND HEEESIES 

times, trying to discover the "origin of evil." 
Vast stores of uncanny legends, and tales of 
wonders have been handed down to us in 
explanation of this most baffling mystery. 

The destructive force in nature had no 
"origin." Just as God, the Constructive Force, 
had none. It was, as God was. - It is and 
always will be, while God and nature are. 

It rides the whirlwind and the flood, and dif- 
ferentiates itself through the smallest minutia 
of the affairs of human life. It is the primeval 
element, the "pure cussedness" which has to be 
conquered, or adjusted in every human being. 
It essays to bar all progress; Ignorance and 
Superstition are its blinded handmaids. It 
exacts the fearful penalties of scornfully mis- 
understood efforts, if not ostracism and per- 
secution, for the use of the diviner faculties. 
It is the spirit of unconquered ill. It is the 
genius of the utterly selfish will of man. 

But it is when it allies itself with the intellect 
and will of man, and becomes the motive power, 
and thus expresses itself in concrete form, as is 
often the case, that our sympathies are touched 
and our sense of justice aroused, and we feel 
our lack of protection from the "powers and 
principalities of the air." Our only refuge is 
in growing to and experiencing a perfect at-one- 
ment with the eternal law of the opposing, the 
Constructive Force — God. There is no protec- 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 33 

tion, no safety, but in the Divine Love and Wis- 
dom. 

VIBRATION. 

There was no beginning ; there can be no end- 
ing. There is a constant, undeviating process 
of changing and readjustment of all the forces 
of the universe. All is vibration. None of 
nature's forces are at rest, at equilibrium. 
Build you a fine dwelling, and ere it is finished 
for yo„ur occupancy, the disintegrating forces 
will have made a raid upon the material of 
which it is constructed. Take notice of the 
signs of decomposition going on in everything 
around you — the accumulation of fluff in your 
rooms, in the innermost of your garments, along 
the seams. So also do the rocks and mountains 
yield themselves to dust, and so does all the 
planet reverberate with the resistless onward 
march of the law of progress, unfoldment, 
evolution from the lower to a higher form of 
expression. 

Lands edging the seas and the inland waters, 
from their constant erosion, slip away and are 
lost. Continents disappear, undermined by 
earthquakes and similar convulsions of nature, 
and new lands arise from the bowels of some 
faraway ocean to keep the balance even. 



34 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 



LIFE. 



From time immemorial the researches of men 
in the vain effort to discover and make known 
to the world the origin of life, of all life, on the 
planet earth and elsewhere, have been most 
anxiously considered. These efforts of the in- 
quiring minds of men have not been altogether 
fruitless of results; because through them has 
been made manifest the most marvelous of all 
the facts in nature, that " there is no death," 
that "what seems so is transition." It has also 
become known and understood of late years, 
that from the ephemera of life, of an hour or of 
a day up to the highest archangel, through all 
the intermediate grades of being, visible and 
invisible, there are no vacant spaces. Every- 
where there is an overwhelming volume of life, 
actual though not conscious or individualized, 
until the higher ranges of human life become 
known and correlated. Comes the man with the 
scalpel. He dissects the human brain, and is 
disgusted at finding no clew to the secret cause 
and source of life. He never suspects, he does 
not conceive of the fact that there is in every- 
one, an immutable, invisible power — a spirit 
germ — nor would he believe in its potency if he 
knew it were true. Then there is the man with 
the retorts and the scales, and the "residues." 
He announces to the world that he can create 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 35 

life without any help from the " Great Spirit' ' 
people talk so much about. There is also the 
man with the bottle full of water, with a hand- 
ful of mud at the bottom. He is sure he can 
produce living organisms ; might even set agoing 
a new race of beings, if he only had time, and a 
larger bottle ! Back of every expression of life 
we know abides the source, the cause of all exist- 
ence, so hid, so truly an integral part of life as 
never to yield a knowledge of itself either to 
the scalpel of the physicians or to the electrical 
battery of the explorer of mysteries. Into this 
sphere can no man come. Herein can be no 
meddling of the human intellect. 

Through this searching for the source, the 
cause of life, man has been brought face to face 
with law, with a force he can never understand 
or conquer, or adjust to the demands or sugges- 
tions of his will. From ancient expressions of 
intelligence have been handed down to us the 
name, the title, God, as a concrete expression of 
this power that holds dominance over all 
created beings. 

Another important revelation made to man 
is the fact that there is but one law, per se. 

It is an established, consecutive, endless chain 
from the beginnings of human life here up to 
the absolute ultimate of the immortal soul. It 
proves the homogeniety of the whole human 
race ; it declares the value of existence here, and 
explains the logical sequence of its continuance 



36 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

beyond this fragment of life into nature's in- 
visible realms. 

What we shall do, each one of us, with our 
individual portion of life; how we shall work 
out our personal experiences, and to what end is 
another matter. There is our heredity which 
is, in every case, so mixed as to yield but little 
of the primal strain, and which gives to each one 
of us unknown possibilities, or undesired idio- 
syncracies to fight out and eradicate from the 
nature. The many failures to discover the 
mystery of life surely ought to prove to all 
experimenters the truth that spirit holds the 
only key to its endless mystery. 

CHUKCHES MONEY MAKEES. 

There is no detail of the ordinary human life 
of all who are in any way connected with the 
church, which has not been exploited for money. 

There is no end to the myths and fables that 
have been put before the superstitious and igno- 
rant, and each and every one has its price ; and 
every celebration draws its pay ; and all for the 
glory of God, not at all for the help of man. 
The peasants and other laborers starve, and are 
overwhelmed by the riot of fatal disease. 

As a money-making concern, it leaves nothing 
to be wished for — it is a great success. 

There was no "beginning," there can be no 
"ending." Whatever appears ended in our 



EVOLUTION" OF THE SOUL 37 

experience is only in seeming, and in other 
shapes and in transformed relationships will 
appear again and again, asserting " There is 
no death, what seems so is transition," change 
of elements and forces. There is but one law; 
one creative centre. One model for advanced 
individualized life in any world; in all worlds. 
The whole purpose and intent of all creation is 
simply to render all inert, unused matter into 
life. The universal Spirit pervades all things. 
Mineral ; vegetable ; animal ; human ; angel ; one 
unbroken chain, from the sod up to divine per- 
fection, from the pigmy races we see here, on 
this small globe, up, forever upward and onward 
to the courts of the "sons of God"; to the 
spheres of the eternally immortal. Ignorant 
mortals assert from time to time, the day and 
the hour of the "End of the World," and 
foolishly prepare for the final destruction of 
this planet. It is true, this earth is always 
coming to an end, and always rehabilitating 
itself with its own unused materials. Mount- 
ains slide down and fill up the valleys. The 
waters of the sea undermine and gnaw off big 
slices from the land ; all, all is motion, vibration ; 
nothing stands still. If it were possible for 
anything in the universe to stop, to break the 
everlasting chain, there would be no universe; 
there would be only chaos come again, and all 
the work of setting the planets a-spinning round 
and round their centres and apportioning the 



38 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

orbits of the stately suns, and their places in the 
precessions of their accompanying worlds; all 
would go for nothing, all would have to be begun 
again, and on the same lines exactly. There 
are no other; there is no other law, and the 
name of the law that holds all in imperishable 
harmony, is Love, just Love. 

LIFE IN NATURE. 

The microscope has revealed to us the life and 
habits of myriads of creatures of whose exist- 
ence we had previously no knowledge. We had 
not even a suspicion that what to our unaided 
vision appeared inert elements held a rampant, 
multitudinous life, nowhere dead, but always 
surging and changing, ever replacing death and 
decay with a new life all its own. Nature's 
luxuriance everywhere fills us with wonder 
and delight. The fragrant ferny depths of 
the forest, and the lush growth of the rank 
marsh-land, the immeasurable sands of the 
ocean-edge hiding in their mysterious sameness 
innumerable and beautiful shells and corals, and 
the mountain top heaped up with boulders, or 
crumbling by nature's processes into pebbly 
imponderance. 

Life, swarming everywhere. Tiny leaflets 
giving succor and shelter to tinier animal life 
— its special fairy. Huge beasts couchant in 
majestic trees, guarding against invasions, with 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 39 

a fierce, jealous rage inherited from the gnomes 
and satyrs. 

Deep sea depths untouched by lightnings, 
where the kraken makes his home ; jolly dolphins 
disporting in the sunlight, responding to the cry 
of the hovering wild duck and gull. Human 
beings overcrowding in the oldest settled por- 
tions of the globe, until nature's resources for 
their sustenance are wellnigh exhausted. 

All these, and many more, might justly be 
enumerated to illustrate the bountiful and inex- 
haustible resources of the great creative, recon- 
structive Power in the universe of matter. 

Life, everywhere life, forcing out death and 
decay. Ever changing its form of expression. 
Eeforming itself upon steadily advancing 
models. All nature swinging in circles so wide 
and vast as to require centuries for their com- 
pletion. 

One of the most fascinating doctrines of the 
Swedish Seer is contained in the "law of cor- 
respondences." By it many things, seemingly 
irregular, ' i fall into line, ' ' and become parts of 
a great process of development. Following this 
method, the earnest, searching mind, looking 
through nature up to "Nature's God," seeks to 
go beyond the confines of the mere animal, mate- 
rial existence, and come into sympathy with and 
get a knowledge of the world unseen, but often 
felt and recognized, spiritual life, filling all the 
spaces which seem to the earth-dimmed senses 



40 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

dull and void. There is no death, no vacancy 
in this realm of nature, any more than in that 
other, more tangible one, the outgrowth and the 
necessity of this great storm-tossed planet. 
But all the expressions of life in this sphere are 
different from those to which our material 
senses are accustomed, and require the action of 
another, a finer, more spiritual set of faculties 
in order to comprehend them even partially 
which, at the best, is all we can hope to do while 
we remain denizens of and subject to the laws 
which control this world of material substance. 

"Jacob's dream" was not a dream only. It 
was a reality. From supernal heights "Lad- 
ders" are ever being dropped down to our 
earth, into our midst, upon which forms im- 
mortal and real "ascend and descend" accord- 
ing to our need and our demand upon them for 
love and help. 

We are continually overshadowed by this 
supermundane existence. Its influences are both 
positive and negative, good and evil. It has 
powers adapted to every issue of human experi- 
ence; because it is the outgrowth, the fruitage 
of human life. Its roots are planted in this 
earth. Its topmost branches wave in the sun- 
light which flows from the "Throne of God." 
It is God. Not a separate and distinct being; 
but an intelligent principle of love abounding 
in everything; expressing itself through every- 
thing. Knowing no "high" or "low." See- 



mm 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 41 

ing no difference between the "just and the 
unjust"; showering down upon all alike, beni- 
sons of wisdom, and peace and good will. 

Gathering all together in one embrace; the 
whole race of man, one undivided family. Its 
divine "Trinity" is Evolution, Progress, Lib- 
erty. Many minds reject this assumption of 
facts, because of the necessity which a recogni- 
tion of them would involve for a readjustment 
of mental processes, and religious beliefs affect- 
ing their daily experience. 

HEAVEN. 

Millions of enfranchised souls pass from 
earth life and find the spirit world — the ' i Sum- 
merland ' ' — a Heaven, and stay therein for vast 
lengths of time. The change from this life of 
toil, and misery to an existence of rest from all 
pain and sorrow of earthly existence is really 
Heaven enough for the average human mind. 
A place of beautiful surroundings, where every- 
thing necessary for their comfort is furnished 
them, without money and without price and, best 
of all, where they no longer fear being grabbed 
up and punished by the devil for their sins of 
ignorance committed when in the body. It is 
not possible for us, plunged, as we all are, into 
the vortex of _ this difficult existence, to realize 
what all this means to the world-weary. If one 
shall halt by the way or fall aside from the 



42 INSIGHTS AND HEEESIES 

great unending procession nothing stops. The 
terrible, tumultuous waves of humanity roll on, 
and the lost are not missed or mourned for, save 
by the few that were responsible for their com- 
ing, or for the awful lack of help and tendance 
that made them failures in the battle of life. 

The great army of the commonplace, the 
neither positively good nor the very bad, is the 
largest class of all humanity. The most pes- 
tiferous and difficult to adjust to the law of 
progress and advancement. Hold one of them 
out of hell by the hair of the head, and when he 
is let go he only drops further in, and nothing 
teaches him but the "slings and arrows" of 
misfortune, and every dreadful experience that 
can be handed out to him. Much of this almost 
universally deplorable condition — it may be the 
whole of it — has been induced by false, unrea- 
sonable religious teachings. The human mind 
needs every inducement to effort to overcome its 
natural inertia instead of being put to sleep by 
promises of being exempt from all responsibil- 
ity connected with its final redemption. 

NATURE SPIRITS. 

The "dwellers at the threshold" are the in- 
dividualized entities of the elements of nature. 
Air, fire, earth depths, and seas. These belong 
to the domain of nature, pure and simple, and 
are met and controlled by the affinities of the 



mm 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 43 

chemicals of the material, physical organization 
of the individual. The most potent of these 
leading in the degree of material success to be 
achieved in dealing with material life. 

Money getting in the mines, earth depths. 
All manufactories that require raging and con- 
tinuous flame; ships to sail, and conquer water 
spirits ; electrical and etherial forces that move 
in the air currents. These are the soulless, 
irresponsible "goblins" and "gnomes," "Fire 
spirits" and "ignes fatui" of the nether world. 
All human beings who progress at all have to 
deal with one or more of these forces. Begin- 
ning in blind ignorance, through struggle, the 
mortal will is developed and the mere animal 
man has set his foot upon a low rung of the 
ladder of the ascending series. Next, man has 
to deal with the primal races. The "Missing 
link" which will never be found save at the 
"threshold" where it combines its forces with 
those of man's other natural enemies, and keeps 
jealous watch and ward at every point of egress 
of the soul which seeks to enlarge its domain. 
Finally the will of man, with its long heredity of 
war with these potentialities, "at enmity with 
God," resisting the divine; even as these have 
striven to hold him in a perpetual slavery, is in 
its last struggle. The vast aggregation of 
human will, set free from the clog of the flesh, 
knowing nothing of the divine, seeing no guid- 
ing light, combines its forces, and commingles 



44 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

its powers with whatever its endless tentacles 
can reach. These are the powers and princi- 
palities of the air. These are the demons, "bad 
spirits, " " devils ' ' and ' ' familiars ' ' of the litera- 
ture of the ages, and the presiding geniuses of 
many a phenomenon resulting from modern re- 
search into the mvsteries of nature. As their 
intelligence exceeds that of the underlying 
grades, so just in that degree is their power 
increased, and used, to block the gateway that 
opens upon the path. Their abodes lie in outer 
darkness, or are illumined only by flashes of 
fictitious, and evanescent light from the expir- 
ing embers of earthly exhalations, and the phos- 
phorescent gleams of decaying forms. The 
soul that has received an illumination from the 
Divine has in its keeping a talisman of power, 
yet none can escape these watchful ones. 

"Here eyes do regard you in eternity's still- 
ness.' ? "Choose well; your choice is brief, but 
yet endless." The winged fiend, the "Ap- 
polyon, ' ' must be met and settled with at every 
turn of the way that leads to the kingdom which 
the Christ came to establish, and whose best 
name is "peace." In this grade, love finds no 
home, but its great prototype, the lust of the 
flesh, stealing ever the livery of heaven, lures on 
tender souls to their sad undoing. 

By help of divine love alone can the soul 
journey safely onward and upward through this 
great concentrated, immediately-environing 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 45 

earth grade. It is solidly compact, sleepless 
and untiring, seeking ceaselessly whom it may 
win to its realm. It is the unrecognized longing 
of the soul for restoration to its divine heritage 
of love. 

EXPERIENCE. 

Experience is at the same time the surest and 
the slowest teacher of men. Wisdom, the 
crowning glory of humanity, is but an enlarged 
perception of man's needs, and how to meet 
them, based upon individual experience and 
observation of the effects of natural law upon 
all. An individual is an epitome of the world 
— society. Discipline is everywhere considered 
indispensable to the individual. Far more is it 
so to the world of society. Anarchy and revolu- 
tion are no more efficient for the body politic 
than for the individual. Growth, slow and 
gradual, aggregation of power and wisdom 
through the education and enlightenment of its 
individual members, is the only safe and sure 
way to permanency and enduring life. 

SPIRITUALISM. 

In Spiritualism alone is to be found an expres- 
sion of the religion of Jesus of Nazereth. It is 
truly democratic, giving to saint and sinner 
alike both here, in this life, and after death, an 



46 INSIGHTS AND HEKESIES 

opportunity for redemption. Its first mission 
to the world is the proof it gives of a continued 
existence in which is still experienced all the 
idiosyncracies which marked the individual in 
earth life. This fact has either been ignored by 
certain classes of minds, or has been taken by 
them as proof positive of the hellish origin of 
its phenomena, whereas in this very expression 
of characteristic life lies its wonderful power 
and potency. From long-continued educational 
influence people out of churches, as well as in- 
side of the influence of their superstitions, have 
come to idealize death, its awe-inspiring mystery 
and its strange variety. It is thought, by them, 
to be a sudden translation from a lower condi- 
tion to a higher, wherein, through some divine 
hocus-pocus, the members of certain so-called 
"Evangelical" churches, no matter how world- 
ly-minded, and selfish, or however false to their 
teachings they have been, or how false their 
lives to the divine ethics taught by the Lord, 
whose name they assume as their prerogative, 
that their through tickets to the supernal 
spheres are assured. It is believed that death 
purges them of all their sympathy with and 
attraction to mortal life, and that they are for- 
ever absolved from all their responsibilities, 
and freed from dependence upon the inter-rela- 
tionships between the two conditions. Exactly 
the reverse is true. Multitudes of souls only 
begin their true living, their comprehension of 



EVOLUTION" OF THE SOUL 47 

life's meanings, after death has sifted them out 
of the ashes and lifeless embers of their mis- 
taken ideas, or vicious indulgences. Shall 
these, then, be brought beneath the ban of limit- 
less darkness, and exiled from the "many man- 
sions" of our Heavenly Father's and Mother's 
house? A tiny rap, untraceable to any material 
source, a table moved by invisible force, a closed 
and locked piano skillfully played upon by un- 
seen hands; these were the first links in an end- 
less chain of eternal benefits pouring down from 
the smiling heavens upon the benighted children 
of earth. Again was heard "the voice as of 
one crying in the wilderness" of this world's 
marts for barter, and selfish gain; "Let him 
who hath ears to hear, let him hear." "The 
grave has lost its victory" and death is but a 
halt called in mercy and loving tenderness, that 
your weary souls may be refreshed by a draught 
from nature's founts and bountiful resources 
that you may mount upward as on the mighty 
wings of eagles ; or discover for your wandering 
feet the path of rectitude and safety. 

PHENOMENA. 

All expressions of nature are phenomenal. 
Man is of all the most wonderful. A tiny spark 
of spirit encased in matter, by the irresistible 
law of progress evolving powers of brain, 
thought, consciousness, reason, intuition; un- 



48 INSIGHTS AND HEKESIES 

folding, expanding; realizing finally his at-one- 
ment with his source, the cause of him — God — 
man immortal, illimitable. At certain points of 
unfoldment seemingly lost, great hue and cry 
from many — pin heads — who think they have 
discovered God, a failure. Watch out and see. 
Give the Lord a chance. Nothing is done with 
yet. In a very old book of Hebrew history, 
there are recorded well-attested accounts of 
phenomena, which are so distinctly outside of 
the ordinary happenings of this material exist- 
ence, that they were always recognized as being 
of a purely spiritual origin, method and pur- 
pose. Within the last century the same experi- 
ences have been vouchsafed to present human- 
ity. Millions of people have attested the truth 
of a continuance of these same phenomena ; they 
having taken place within the range of their 
own personal experience. And why not? The 
Creator knows what his children need in this, as 
well as in other ages. That human souls, the 
lives of human beings, persist after physical 
death, does not prove their eternal existence 
along the lines of highest soul evolution. The 
greatest possible unfoldment is not a gift of God. 
It is held only by the individual soul as the re- 
sult of age-long study, and toil, through manifold 
embodiments, long-continued self renunciation, 
and sacrifices not yet known or understood. Its 
initiations are endless; its revelations of the 
infinite law are, at times, too seemingly trifling 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 49 

for recognition; but as the lapidary leaves no 
facet of the jewel uncut and unpolished, so the 
guardians — the guides and teachers of the can- 
didates for spiritual unfoldment — omit no least 
lesson or discipline that can aid in perfecting 
the individual soul. 

It is the meanest kind of bosh teaching people 
that there will be eternal punishment for ig- 
norant wrong-doings in this short kindergarten 
experience of life, making them believe their 
last chance for anything better is gone forever. 
Half the sins that are committed here anyway 
are either sins against the conventionalities, or 
they have been hatched up by some unsext 
priests and have nothing to do with the case. 
Besides, the sins of the body in many a poor 
mortal are left with the body in the grave. 

The ages, the aeons required for the perfecting 
of any given soul, are known only to its Creator, 
or how great must be the accumulation of ages 
ere the whole human family — the children of 
God — will respond to the eternal roll-call that 
shall usher in the redeemed of every land and 
clime, not one "Lost," or gone astray. Those 
who have stepped forth into the arena of this 
present manifestation of life on this planet, 
have, each in their place, their responsibility 
and task, to keep alight the beacons of reason, 
and intelligence, as guides to truth, and to 
pander never to the powers of ignorance and 



50 INSIGHTS AND HEBESIES 

superstition, however manifested by Church, or 
State. 

MEDIUMSHIP. 

Mediumship today is clearly an abnormalism. 
But the history of the world has been that the 
so-called abnormalisms of one generation are 
the accepted, commonplace realisms of the suc- 
ceeding types. Sight, the desire to see, existed 
first in the mind of the unfolding human brain; 
the will joined its forces to aid the work of 
liberation and the visual nerves began to form 
and grow. The imprisoned soul within kept 
pushing on, until gradually the beautiful, com- 
plex organ of sight was evoluted and the soul 
possessed a window through which it could see 
things for itself. The evolutionary processes 
attending mediumship quite correspond to this 
physical process. Man demands to know con- 
cerning those things that have long been hid, 
and to understand the i ' deep things of God, ' ' and 
so the soul of him is saying, "I, too, have visions 
unspeakable, ' ' and closing up the avenues of his 
external sight, he sees and apprehends truth, a 
light upon his path, of which in his previous, 
darkened state he had never conceived. The 
intuitional faculties being the true interpreters 
of the immortal soul, are capable of unlimited 
cultivation, unlike those of the intellect which 
have always the limitations of cerebral organ- 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 51 

ization. These powers are as limitless as 
God, and only through the expansion and rec- 
ognized rational, practical use and application 
of these faculties — now sometimes falsely 
named supernatural — can the human race 
pass out from its present environment of dark- 
ness, and crime, and reaching upward expand 
into a saving knowledge of the truth, as made 
known by the Christs. 

THE MIGRATIONS OF OUR EACE. 

Vast numbers of times has the human race 
marched around this world on which we live. 
Each journey of the whole family has embraced 
a cycle of time. Each cycle has been rounded 
up by some great cataclysm of nature, which has 
left the earth desolated, in ruins, to rest from 
the invasions of its nomadic children. 

Of the truth of these great convulsive throes 
of the planet we have many ancient legendary 
accounts. The Biblical accounts, and the irref- 
utable testimony of the globe itself, as recorded 
in the veined strata which have held their rec- 
ord for ages inviolably concealed, until man 
should finally bring to the unmasking of her 
secrets an intelligence clarified from the mists 
of superstition, and illuminated by the intuition 
not only of the soul, but of the intellect and 
reason. 



52 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 



THE DISCIPLINE OF LIFE. 

' ' The mills of the gods grind always, 

They grind exceeding small, 

And with great exactness grind they all." 

Their "hoppers" are too numerous to be 
counted. Physical pain, sorrow of many sorts 
and kinds, losses and crosses innumerable, un- 
ending disappointments, holding back the ambi- 
tions from all satisfactory realization of pet 
schemes, and finally, physical death. Not one 
human creature escapes. Into the hoppers 
they go, again and again, time after time, till 
the refining process is completed and the soul is 
fit to stand in holy and exalted presence, and to 
be set to do the work of the Master. Here and 
there some gifted soul realizes that its anguish 
means "growing pains." A was described as 
a ' ' good man who let the Lord do anything He 
wanted to, to him." 

The discipline of this life is hard to bear ; but 
if people will not learn the lesson intended, here 
and now, they will be forced back through re- 
embodiments until this life can teach them noth- 
ing more, and they have finally earned a right 
to a place in the heavens — the home of the gods 
— where perfect peace abides. 

Men are naturally gregarious. In all phases 
of life they seek sympathetic comrades, or fol- 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 53 

lowers that they can hypnotize to do their will. 
They instinctively set themselves off into 
classes, and while this is useful as a protection 
from invasion, conditions in India show the 
evils of class-caste distinctions carried to a 
ridiculous extreme. The vast, surging, unyield- 
ing predatory classes on this earth consist of 
those who have but lately — comparatively — 
emerged from the animal kingdom, and have 
not yet been put through the mill of reincarna- 
tion times enough to rid them of their wild 
beast "tricks and manners," and make of them 
men and women fit to have around. The dread- 
ful thing is, having to live on the same planet 
with them, and endure their terrible onslaughts 
upon the peace, and happiness of the unfolded, 
the civilized portions of the race. But all are 
of common origin. Such as they are, all have 
been, and such as the highly developed, educated 
and useful class are now, they will surely be- 
come. 

HOMOGENEITY OF THE EACE. 

The "dreamer" who passes through this life, 
satisfied with the creations of his own fancy, 
adds nothing to the practical needs or demands 
of his day and time. In all the years and ages 
of the intellective life of the planet, such men 
and women have Kved and walked their little 



54 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

round atween the two oceans which bound the 
shores of birth and death. 

But a truer concept of the meanings of an 
earthly existence has arisen in the minds of 
gifted humanity. The cloister gives way to the 
open court; the inspired ones are seeking the 
roads which may lead out from hazy, unproven 
cloud-land into the brightness of the everyday, 
practical life which the world must have experi- 
ence of, along all lines, among all classes, high 
and low, ignorant and learned, ere it can dis- 
lodge the incubus of superstition, and unde- 
velopment under which it has staggered along, 
through devious ways of despair and unbelief, 
to awaken at last to a realization of the final 
destiny of humanity. 

To the average mind the far-off, unascer- 
tained and dim, is what is most attractive. 
Sending missionaries to the so-called "hea- 
then," or speculating upon the social conditions 
of people supposed to be living on other planets, 
is of vital interest to their soaring minds. Any 
amount of money and good red blood of human- 
ity, if need be, are not too large a price to pay 
for the gratification of these projects of unsatis- 
fied mentality. The vast body politic, the 
struggling, seething masses of humanity grope 
and dig along their appointed ways, and the 
progress of the entire race of man toward an 
enlightened homogeneity is at a seeming stand- 
still. The homogeneity of the whole race in its 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 55 

absolute entirety, is the key-note of the life 
which is to be here, on this mortal earth, and 
thus every experience of individuals or of na- 
tions becomes of vast importance. 

Every event, small or great, that serves to 
illustrate the possibility of fellowship, and 
brotherhood among the children of men, is a 
milestone on the way to this recognition of the 
homogeneity of the human race. In obedience 
to this law, this demand of the evolutionary 
forces our brave sons, and lovely daughters, 
are, all unconsciously to themselves, following 
the beckoning hand of noblest progress toward 
peace, and mutuality, and are allying them- 
selves with the representatives of races and 
peoples hitherto considered foreign and unre- 
lated to us, in all ways save the commercial. 
What bonds shall ever be forged between the 
nations of the earth that can supersede such ties 
of love and fealty to family and home? 

The external aspects of these alliances, 
though yielding honors, and coveted opportuni- 
ties, are of the smaller importance compared 
with the amazing factors of peace and amity 
between the nations that are silently and cer- 
tainly working themselves out toward the 
beautiful exemplification of the universal 
Fatherhood of God, the inextinguishable senti- 
ment of the final unity of his earthly children. 



56 



INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 



One of the strangest phases of human life 
here is the almost universal resistance to im- 
provement. But this conservative attitude is 
also a balance, prevents running off on tangents. 

OF GOD. 



It has been popularly reported that science 
has driven God out of the world. Science has 
refuted ignorant beliefs, driven superstition out 
of the minds of people, and opened many minds 
to the great facts of life as against the silly 
beliefs of primitive peoples. It is thought by 
many that the history of all God's doings is 
writ in the Holy (?) Book — the Bible. From 
the study of his character, one might fancy that 
" Great Jove of Mount High Olympus" was 
come again with only his name changed from 
Jove to Jehovah, for He brought with him all 
the "high days," and ceremonies, and every 
vice and delinquency, and outrage that had 
marked pagan rule. He gave special directions 
as to the killings-off of the Hitites, and the 
Jebusites and all the other ites. There weren't 
to be any Ites or any other "furriners" left 
alive to pester his chosen people. He went 
right on giving directions as to how these peo- 
ple were to be disposed of, making such awful 
suggestions, specially as to the women, that if 
He had not been known to be God, He might 
have been recognized as the Head-up Devil. It 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 57 

has been written: "By their fruits ye shall 
know them." What are the results, the 
"fruits," of the Jehovian dispensation? They 
are just exactly such as must naturally follow 
the teachings and influences of the spirit of hate 
and vengeance ; the suppression of reason, hold- 
ing back the progress of the race, fettering the 
brains of men with bonds of ignorance and 
superstition, a network of lies and myths. 
Through the dominance of selfishness and greed, 
the boasted freedom of men has been lost — they 
are slaves to a man-made religion. So science 
has served the highest interest of humanity in 
doing all it can to drive out this sort of a God, 
with his hell and eternal punishment, from the 
world. The reasoning, thinking world has out- 
grown such a wicked, despotic God, and is de- 
manding quite another sort of Deity. Human- 
ity has to be taught what it must have to equip 
it for its higher, nobler destiny. Justice to all 
in equal measure ; Eeason and Love must abide 
and work out their results, their "fruits," in 
human lives. The unanimous refusal of the 
framers of the "Constitution" of the United 
States to set forth therein the will of God, and 
his commands was wise and farseeing. It has 
raised up a barrier against the encroachments 
of every form of popular religion and has given 
a semblance to freedom of thought and speech. 

All along the way, seers and prophets — in- 
spired mediums — have wrought and sung of the 



58 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

days to come when all the earth should rejoice 
in peace and good will. The magnificence of 
their inspired and inspiring words, their im- 
mortal melodies of praise of the Creator will 
stand while this world lasts. The fact that his 
people had diviner instincts than had He 
whom they worshipped as God, showed that 
"Yahweh" was only the guardian spirit of the 
great and wonderful Hebrew race. 

The greatest discovery of the past century, 
far greater than any revelation of science or 
knowledge of past ages, revealed by modern re- 
search is the discovery of a God of Love. Not 
of that sentimental expression of maudlin emo- 
tion that soon evaporates in hypocritical make- 
believe; but the profound recognition of the 
rightful consideration of every human being, 
regardless of race, color or belongings. 

OF JESUS. 

The knowledge we have gained through the 
study and research of earnest, truth-seeking 
souls who have found that all known religions 
have a common root — have the same basis of 
truth — is a proof of the value of the revelations 
given to the world through the teachings of our 
Christ. 

From no other have we been given, in an ex- 
ternalized, practical form, those great, eternal 
religious principles which must forever stand 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 59 

as the rule and guide of human souls. No an- 
cient philosopher had evolved to a Grod-likeness 
that enabled him to go beyond a high stand- 
point of moral perfection, or to give to his 
disciples what was most needed by the world 
for its comforting in the accumulating, expand- 
ing experiences incident to earthly life. 

Jesus, our Christ, the Christ of the religion 
named for him was the transmitter of heavenly 
truths. To him the world owes forever a debt 
for making known a knowledge of the fact of 
the continued existence of the individual being 
after physical death, and it was given to him to 
point out the way of life that can alone lead to 
eternal happiness and peace. He is our 
Teacher, our Leader above all others. We have 
nothing to do with the impossible, faked-up per- 
sonality that the priests have so long exploited 
as the "blood Redeemer" of the world; it is to 
the inspired philanthropist, the greatly-loving 
man that we owe our allegiance. This will ap- 
pear more and more as time goes on, and a lot 
of untruths will fade out and give place to great 
realities. 

THE GODS. 

The pagan gods were innumerable and their 
distinctive attributes were understood. They 
well might be, as they were only deified men 
and women. The next unfoldment caused 



60 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

them to raise altars to "the unknown God." 
Then came Jesus, the Nazarene, who told them 
that the "unknown God" was their Heavenly 
Father, not of a chosen people only, but of all 
the human race. The new religion, inspired by 
Jesus — our Christ — and which was to bear his 
name, naturally brought with it all the supersti- 
tions of the pagans, and these have been handed 
down through the ages, and accepted and be- 
lieved as true. 

The primitive conception of a god was of a 
being with qualities like their own, and as men 
delighted in rapine and every possible accom- 
panying vice and crime, so they endowed their 
gods in like manner, fashioning beings to be 
feared and to whom must be given big offerings 
and sacrifices. So long as these were limited to 
beasts it was a good thing, because the priests 
who ate the flesh thus consecrated were sure of 
cheap meat for a long time thereafter. But 
when the "firstlings of the flock" failed to 
bring satisfactory responses to the demands of 
the suppliants, they began sacrificing human 
lives in the vain hope of allaying the anger and 
vengeance of the dissatisfied all-powerful gods, 
and beautiful young maidens were thrust into 
the fiery jaws of Moloch, or crushed in the coils 
of sacred serpents, or slain upon altars accord- 
ing to the special god whose propitiation was 
sought. 

From all these inhuman practices to a recog- 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 61 

nition of a God of love and mercy was a step so 
long that even yet there remain in the teachings 
of religionists indications of similar ideas, 
wherein not only nature's culminating efforts, 
but all the painful experiences of human beings 
are accepted and feared as expressions of the 
"wrath of God." 

KNOWLEDGE OF OCCULT LAW. 

The invitation of one of old to his followers, 
and fellow believers: "Come let us reason to- 
gether, ' ' marks the dividing line between knowl- 
edge and superstition. The daring of the mind 
of man proves him to be, in very truth, "a child 
of God." No arcana of knowledge are too 
deeply hid in mystery to escape the prying of 
his curiosity, his longing for enlightenment, his 
long-sustained and vigorous efforts to surprise 
the hidden things of God and Nature. Livings- 
ton and Stanley wrought in the jungles of 
Africa, Audubon and Agassiz in the fastnesses 
of tropical America. These in the material 
world, the world of effects. Gessner and 
Varley, Darwin and Spencer, together with a 
long list of other inspired minds, have given 
their best thoughts, devoted their noblest ener- 
gies to the explorations of the world of causes, 
the occult and invisible realms of pure princi- 
ples in God and Nature. Back of all these there 
lies the richest bequest ever made to humanity 



62 



INSIGHTS AND HEEESIES 



in the discoveries and revelations of the most 
ancient " adepts," the fathers of mystical lore, 
in the light of modern discoveries and inven- 
tions, mystical no longer; bnt practical and full 
of earnest meaning in their adaptation and 
adjustment to the needs and wants of the citi- 
zens of the world today. 

EVANESCENCE OF MEEE BELIEFS. 



Proclaim not mere beliefs today, and be not 
labelled and pigeon-holed and held to account 
on any special line of thought or action lest the 
individual soul be barred out from a conception 
and knowledge of some far grander truth. At 
best our view is narrow and contracted, else 
were we gods, and as we grow we discover our 
little, vaunted beliefs to be but as tiny shreds 
of color in God's great mosaic, our song of 
triumph and discovery but as the buzzing of the 
insect to the chorals of the chanting hosts of 
heaven. So, then, an eternal negation is the 
safest attitude of the unfolding soul. Mere 
beliefs, unproven by facts, are so many barriers 
set up for the soul to overleap and leave behind 
on its onward march. 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 63 



THE FOUNT OF INSPIRATION FOE ALL. 

"The righteous shall inherit the earth.' 9 
Just so far as we are able to prove our Tight- 
ness, the world — nay the whole universe of God 
— is ours. Our Heavenly Father has never 
said : i i Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther, 
upon the road to knowledge." Everything in- 
vites us ; get wisdom, get understanding, and to 
thy knowledge add virtue are the recommenda- 
tions from inspired sources, and to the soul that 
fears not, revelations upon every line stand 
invitingly open. 

MAN VERSUS DEATH. 

In all the domain of organized being, it is 
only man, who, in his crude egotisms, and defiant 
resistance to nature's laws, makes ado with 
death. The dainty denizen of the air, and the 
things that creep over the earth, the leviathan 
in his nature element, and his warmer-blooded 
brother whose passage causes the earth to 
tremble beneath his tread, all the multitudinous 
expressions of the animal kingdom, that disport 
themselves in fur, or feather, in filament of 
scales, or covering of hair, each and all recog- 
nize the approach of their final experience on 
earth, and hie themselves to their appointed 
coverts, to keep their tryst with their old mother 



64 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

in utter privacy. How well she loves her chil- 
dren ! She sheds over them her varied mantle 
of leaf, and piney bloom, or scented brake, and 
soothes them with softly falling rain, or tender 
dew, and woos their elements back into her 
bosom from which they sprang. All this is in 
consonance with nature's arrangement for car- 
ing for her own. There is no such thing known 
among these as a vulgar display, or a flaunting 
of the deposed forces in the faces of the creat- 
ures left behind. 

In man's treatment of his kind, there is 
everywhere betokened his unfaith and fear. 
His undeveloped spirituality leaves him without 
even so much power to adjust himself to the 
divine order of progress, by way of the gates of 
death — rebirth — as have his humble progenitors, 
his representatives in the animal kingdom ; and 
so he plants himself upon his fancied preroga- 
tives, and turns his dulled senses away from 
the God-call: "Come up higher," and moans 
and raves, and howls his despair in sounds and 
terms indicative of his tribal, or racial environ- 
ment and relationship. 

A voice of love has sounded down throughout 
the ages in unmistakable terms to the children 
of men. "My father has many mansions, in- 
visible to your seared, earthly vision, but beauti- 
fully furnished forth for all your needs; nor 
hath eye seen or ear of yours heard the won- 
derfulness of the great preparation He hath 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 65 

made to receive yon into his kingdom." And 
seer and sage have reiterated this in unmis- 
takable language, and the enlightened of the 
older races have caught the straying tones of the 
vibrant air of the beyond, and have beheld the 
mirage of the homes of the blest, and have 
sought to impress the truth of the living reality 
of the beyond upon the inchoate brains of their 
fellows. But superstition rears its grizzled 
front alike in seats of learning, in the homes of 
the cultured, and in the hovels of the outcasts ; 
in this sense, all the human family are of hellish 
kin, and in a large percentage of them their 
whole lives are given over to their effort of 
resistance to the divine ordering which speaks 
ever to the soul of man in unmistakable terms 
of tender consideration, saying: "Thy poor 
days here are full of pain and sorrow, because 
of necessary crudities. So live that when thy 
summons comes to join the everlasting caval- 
cade which sweeps across the world, thou shalt 
apprehend thy high emprise, and go forth exult- 
ingly to claim thine own meed of further exist- 
ence in spheres yet undiscovered to thy longing 
ken. ' ' 

"Earth loses thy pattern forever and aye" 
that thou mayst be renewed and set up in the 
finer mould of thy most excellent Karma, which 
is thy hidden reality of character. Rejoice 
then, mortal ! in the beneficence of nature and 
of thy Parents, God, for surely it is well that 



66 INSIGHTS AND HEBESIES 

they call a halt for thee and thine beside the 
river of death, and loosen thy burthens of pain 
and heart-breaking sorrow, and let loose from 
thy soul that raven, " Never more," which has 
preyed long upon thy soul and held thee in the 
grip of unspoken despair and anguish. This is 
of all demons the blackest and most subtle. In 
tones of love it has been proclaimed by the 
divine mind that nought is ever taken away that 
shall not be restored to thee. Not as thou, in 
thy small, limited way, wouldst hold it back 
from its own high place, and mission in the uni- 
verse and bend it to thy purpose ; but according 
to the wisdom of its Creator and thine, shalt 
thou see and know and claim all that belongs to 
thee, be it the inspiration of thy nature, unex- 
pressed here amid the din and rush of this 
chaotic existence; or power to carry forth thy 
grandly bold designs in conjunction with 
nature's illimitable chemistry; or to perfect 
within thy mind a knowledge of her laws ; or to 
fold to thy bereaved heart thy lover, friend, or 
child, so lost to thee now in the great unexplored 
silences, that thou wilt not even try to see their 
way of life, but art ever persistent in saying 
they are dead. Whatever thy soul shalt cherish 
as highest and best good to be longed for, that 
shall be given to thee, in its new and resurrected 
form, over which has passed the chrism of the 
immortal and everlasting life. We need a new 
perception of that great law of the ' i survival of 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 67 

the fittest. ' ' Who are the " fit ' ' ? The nomadic 
tramp who yields no meed of use to his fellows ? 
The willfully sin-sodden who poisons all his 
surrounding atmosphere with the noxious ex- 
halations from his decaying organism? He 
who hoards and locks away from his fellows his 
treasures of gold or precious knowledge, and 
he, who having in his hands the powers of 
wealth and influence, never deigns to stretch 
forth his hand to relieve the cruel stress of the 
needy or to protect the helpless, or to sustain 
and strengthen the weaker ones of earth? 

Nay! The true "survival" is not here on 
this underdone sphere, but outside, beyond, 
above, in the realms of the spiritual where our 
burdens are loosed and the souls of men are set 
free, and true liberty is accorded to each and 
everyone to be, and to do, all that in him lies 
toward the upbuilding of the great sum of the 
soul life we call God. 

Once this perception of the soul and even 
some slight degree of knowledge concerning the 
laws which hold over the destiny of each individ- 
ual being becomes, through a familiarity with 
phenomena now everywhere common, under- 
stood and accepted, the entire life on this planet 
will be changed, elevated and happified. Fancy 
living day after day under the bondage of the 
fear and dread of what everyone knows to be 
as inevitable as is the experience of each, of 
physical dissolution; and yet multitudes of peo- 



68 INSIGHTS AND HEKESIES 

pie do so live. It is debasing, and disennobling 
in every way. It robs the soul of all its natural 
dignity and sends it through the world 
orphaned, and mourning, where it might and 
should recognize its divine relationship, and 
rejoice in its unfolding powers; and so you who 
may be giving a moment to the reading of this 
brief testimony to the great truth of immortal- 
ity, consider, and realize thy divine paternity 
and demand what is, and has always been thine 
own by right of interblending of thy own inner 
nature with that of thy soul's origin, the heart 
of Him who hath made us. 

The bond is eternal and indestructible. God 
in all humanity and we in Him, and the sooner 
we see this and yield ourselves in obedience, 
not like "dumb driven cattle" but as self- 
respecting, self-asserting mortals — within the 
law of accord with the highest — the sooner shall 
we enter into that * ' Nirvana ' ' which is ' 6 peace. ' ' 

FEAR OF DEATH. 

In the childhood of the race, the time of its 
exclusively animal life, it was necessary for its 
protection that there should exist in the slowly 
unfolding human mind a great, overwhelming 
terror of death. In fact at that time indiffer- 
ence to death would have involved the entire 
race of man in utter extinction. From that 
time have come down to us superstitions and 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 69 

fears which, while acting still in the minds of 
the ignorant as a preservative of human life 
even under most terrible conditions, have at the 
same time shrouded countless numbers of good 
and useful lives with gloom, overshadowing 
them with a horror from which they could not 
escape. It has been less the actual fear of 
death, but of what might be in store for them 
after they should have passed through this 
experience which is so inevitable to us all. 
Jesus prophesied of a time to come wherein 
death should lose its sting, and thus be swal- 
lowed up in the victory of the spirit over mat- 
ter. 

The enjoyment of this life demands that, 
right here and now, we should begin to know 
and understand how we are to establish our 
individual relationship to the invisible, the real 
world — the world of causes, the world of law — ■ 
so as to bring to us a sufficient knowledge of the 
hidden mysteries of the future life to give us 
some certain grounds for faith in the unseen. 
This can only be accomplished by the develop- 
ment of our own occult powers, or by learning 
of the psychic experiences of others which serve 
to point the way to what we may come to know 
for ourselves. 

It is all one, here, hereafter, anywhere. 
Caught in the web of life, there is no escape 
from its demands upon the individual soul. 
Somewhere along the way it has to decide its 



70 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

own fate. Upward and onward, or down into 
the purlieus of the crude beginnings of things. 
It is free to make its choice. It can pursue the 
hard and toilsome path of earning its right to 
eternal happiness, or it can flop around through 
all the hells of life unrelated to God, and resist- 
ant to the Christ. 

It is the fear of death, of physical dissolu- 
tion, that is to be individually conquered. This 
can only come as a result of a perception of 
spiritual law, and the unfoldment of the spirit- 
ual nature. 

The fear of death, of what may lie beyond, 
has been nature's safeguard against a universal 
stampede out of this life when the miseries of 
existence on this earthly plane become too 
dreadful to be borne; when the tortures of the 
soul in the tortured body drives out all reason 
and all philosophy, and the consciousness senses 
only the demand for surcease of agony. But 
when the "golden bowl" is broken — the silver 
cord of human life is severed — by suicide — 
nothing has been gained by a changed environ- 
ment. There are the same responsibilities and 
soul needs, and the miseries and unsatisfied 
desires of their minds are exactly the same. 
Nothing has been gained, but much has been 
lost. Brave, staunch souls one by one obey the 
call to march over the "border land" into 
nature's invisible realms; they cannot help 
themselves, no one can. On they go, an endless 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 71 

caravan into the land of revelations, the place 
of reviews, where the utterly selfish are fetched 
up with a " round turn," and made to realize 
that a real godliness is the only thing that can 
"pass muster," that mere beliefs do not count, 
and only character tells. How swiftly, how 
inevitably their places are filled ; nothing stops ; 
prince or peasant, it is all one; the will of the 
gods — the guardians of this planet, is being 
fulfilled. Life here is just one link in the end- 
less, unbreakable chain of individual existence. 



Most fortunate is the soul that is started out 
to make the journey of life without being handi- 
capped by some narrowing religious supersti- 
tion or an intellectual bias that limits the mind, 
preventing all unf oldment of originality. 

TEST OF CHARACTER. 

Sooner or later everyone who has character 
enough to make any sort of a test worth while, 
has to have a regular bout with his "evil 
genius." Christ said: "The devil hath de- 
sired thee that he may sift thee as wheat." 
The form which the test takes depends entirely 
upon the organization of the individual. But 
it is in every case the same thing. The 
thorough arousal of the latent powers of the 
nature, and the suffering which ensues from 
the results of its unbalanced actions, constitute 



72 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

the discipline of this life. "We can no more 
escape it, or subvert the action of this law of 
evolution than we can put a stop to any of the 
upheavals of nature. The volcano and the 
earthquake are but the expressions of power in 
the globe which we inhabit to throw off her 
old, and ascend through violent agitation to 
higher conditions. There is a natural corre- 
spondence in the experience of her inhabitants 
and that of our old, old mother ! 



Back of protoplasm, back of organic human 
form is the soul — a thought of God, a spark of 
divine, eternal life ; imperishable, immutable as 
God himself. 

CHARACTER FORMING. 

All animals, the human creature included, 
are born blind and this physical condition of 
man absolutely typifies his life-long state, 
owing either to his environment, his heredity, 
or his false education. The great mass of 
humanity come into the world unmarked by any 
specially-developed individuality. These are 
the legitimate prey of priests and teachers who 
have their place, or use in the evolution of the 
lower grades of life on this planet. 

The smaller number of advanced souls that 
are "cast upon the shoals of time," the evolved 
thinkers, the philosophers have by far the more 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 73 

trying, and difficult life ; for the highly individ- 
ualized man or woman cannot belong to any set 
school of ethics ; there are no fixed landmarks, 
religious or otherwise. Blinded by inherited 
prejudices, if not by destructive tendencies, with 
ideals for which there is no seeming avenue in 
this commonplace, workaday world; the life of 
such an one is ever a grope toward the light of 
truth. 

Lacking the sagacity, the primal instinct of 
self -protection in common with the nature chil- 
dren of the wilds, he plunges forward on his 
unlit way, and has many a fall into the bogs 
and morasses of life until he finally sees that 
only from the higher, the spiritual side of exist- 
ence can come to humanity redemption from 
the errors, wrong thinking and action that is 
the cause of all sin and sorrow of the world. 
Blessed, indeed, are those to whom this under- 
standing comes in time to harmonize conflicting 
beliefs and tendencies, and to be the means of 
rounding out the life, and perfecting that most 
potent and powerful of all things, a noble 
human character. 

MAN THE FINAL EARTH PRODUCT. 

In man Nature has reached her highest evolu- 
tion. His life and being are the topmost rung 
of the ladder, but she has not finished with him. 
It is universally believed that physical death 



74 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

severs everlastingly her dominion over him, and 
thus ends all her service to him. This is by no 
means true. Man is her offspring, her child, 
and to her he returns again and again, drawing 
from her complex, multitudinous, many-cham- 
bered heart such forces as shall bring to him 
the experiences he requires to further unfold his 
nature and bring forth all his possibilities. 

Not man alone but the planet itself is in the 
mills of the gods. The seeds, the germs of life 
that were expressed in such ways in the begin- 
nings of life on this world, still exist in a greatly 
modified degree and the misunderstood phases 
of nature's ministry are the results of the out- 
working of these primitive elements still inher- 
ing in the world-stuff of which human bodies 
are made. 

Nature wields her powers of fire and flood 
and devastating epidemics mercilessly; she con- 
stantly rids herself of her superfluous offspring, 
and forces them to a new environment in her 
invisible realms, through which they pass, gain- 
ing more or less by the experience and from 
which each must emerge, and continue to evolve 
and grow according to the law of his own being. 

SUPEKSTITIONS. 

Fear of the unknown has given birth to all the 
superstitions that have afflicted the minds of 
ignorant and unthinking people. Few people 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 75 

escape some form of superstition. For in- 
stance, the silly sayings, anent the moon, "Fair 
Priestess of the Night." It is unlucky to see 
it in its newness — so and so — when the real 
fact is, it is a merciful Providence that permits 
us to see it in any of its phases, over the left 
shoulder or over the right, or through the glass, 
or in any way at all. There is nothing more 
"lucky" or glorious than to have good eyesight 
of one's own, with which to behold this and all 
the other beauties of nature. The man who 
chanced to be passing under a ladder just at 
the moment when a workman half-way up let 
fall a bucket of paint which struck and deluged 
him, had some reason for thinking it "unlucky" 
to go under instead of around such an impedi- 
ment to travel. But not once in a lifetime 
would such a thing happen to any one, and it is 
impossible to imagine what going under ladders 
or meeting loads of barrels, or funerals, or 
opening umbrellas in the house, instead of out- 
side of it, or any of the hundreds of silly, 
puerile, fool superstitions that have sprung 
from no one knows where, and that have no 
scientific meaning, and no earthly bearing upon 
the realities of any life have "to do with the 
case." These are all the offsprings of minds 
tinctured by fear of they know not what, and 
which are peddled around and handed down 
religiously from one generation to another, to 
keep alive a sensationalism whose tendency is 



76 



INSIGHTS AND HEEESIES 



to blind those who accept them to the great liv- 
ing fact of God's providence which is and has 
ever been ruling the lives of his earthly chil- 
dren. 

SELF-JUSTICE. 



While self-abnegation is a valued experience 
in the spiritual discipline which goes to the 
formation of a perfect character, the reaction 
where the ego posits itself upon the law of jus- 
tice to self, is in reality the beginning of salva- 
tion to the individual. But preachment from any 
source cannot avail with any soul deeply im- 
mersed in work for others. There is too much 
in array against it. The established heredity 
concerning the first duty of woman is of itself 
alone a formidable influence to be overcome; 
then either the real needs, or the selfishness of 
others, present obstacles beyond the power of 
loving, sensitive souls to resist. The change 
must come from the consciousness of the in- 
dividual of her own needs along these lines, 
which alone can arouse one to sufficient will, and 
purpose to be true to one's self if the heavens 
fall. This is first, and above all other con- 
siderations. 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 77 



SYMBOLISM. 

A crude and inartistic symbolism is revolting 
to a spiritually-unfolded consciousness. True 
mystic symbolisms must observe accurately the 
finer law of correspondences or they fail to 
appeal to such as these, and become to the occult 
a mild form of blasphemy. 

LOVE. 

No phase of human character — of mental or 
spiritual philosophy — has engrossed so much 
attention or received such a variety of treat- 
ment as has human love. Nearly everyone who 
thinks at all, has been brought, at some stage of 
experience, to an attempt at analyzing the emo- 
tional, sentimental nature, asking: "What is 
Love?" 

In contradistinction to that which repels, and 
disintegrates, it is attraction. Love is God, it 
draws elements together, and holds them in 
proper spheres. It centralizes and builds up. 
It is controlled by fixed laws ; it is only "blind' ' 
to those who have not investigated its nature, 
and office unshrinkingly, with an eye to a com- 
plete understanding of its true function. De- 
voted humanitarians have shown us how to 
feed, exercise, and rest the physical system, in 
order to produce health. Ministers of the 



78 INSIGHTS AND HEEESIES 

Gospel have taught souls the way of life ever- 
lasting. Professors of the various sciences and 
arts, useful and ornamental, have instructed the 
intellects of men, and now and then a woman; 
but with all these, the affections — the crowning 
— rather the integral element of all life and 
being, have had few, or no exponents who have 
ever attempted to treat them from any basis 
which can be called philosophical, or which 
could ever serve as a guide to one uninitiated in 
their occult phases. 

The ordinary expression of this part of the 
nature, is a vampyrism which is constantly on 
the alert to see what, and how much it can 
gobble up for its own delectation. This is the 
lowest grade. It begins with the selfism of the 
individual, its manifestations are named lust. 
It seeks expression through the sensuous na- 
ture, but extends to the spirit and will. 

Love ! What crimes are committed in thy 
name! What laying waste of true and tender 
hearts, what defacing of sweet bodies, fashioned 
and set up as temples of the spirit ! 

This vampyrism extends through every de- 
partment of the affectional nature. It exists 
not only among men and women recognized as 
lovers, married or otherwise, but parents are 
ghouls to their children, and friends devour 
each other without stint. Attraction is that 
law which draws together two opposite elements 
or forces, positive and negative, or male and 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 79 

female. As the nature and attributes of a 
human being are multiform, so are the attrac- 
tions, or loves, numerous. Ignorance of the 
laws which ought to control and adjust these 
loves, is the prime cause of all the misery and 
crime with which the earth is flooded. Two 
people of the opposite sex are attracted through 
the intellect on this plane, and realizing the 
limit of the law which draws them together, 
they could be admiring friends forever; but 
ignorant of their needs outside of this, they 
attempt to force a conjugal relationship which 
too often ends in dislike. Every grade of lust 
and love finds representation in the so-called 
marriage relation, as it stands today. Intel- 
lects and spirits without any bodies — worth 
mentioning — and gross mortal remains un- 
vitalized by souls. The former class ignore the 
claims of the physical, and gather their robes 
together sanctimoniously indicating: "Avaunt, 
lest my purity be contaminated"; while the 
latter laugh their spiritual pride and fastidious- 
ness to scorn. The war goes on between good 
and evil, whereas there is really no just ground 
for difference. All that is needed for the attain- 
ment of harmony and peace is a wise adjust- 
ment of these forces in individuals and in 
societv. 



The growth of all true character must be slow 
and gradual. It is not enough that the soul 



80 INSIGHTS AND HEEESIES 

perceives the beauty of a grand, moral life, it 
must also learn to live it humbly, earnestly and 
truly. 

"IDEALS OF LOVE." 

i i Greater love hath no man than that he shall 
give his life for another, ' ' whether the scene be 
set upon the mimic stage, or on the broad 
theatre of the world. Heroic rescues, desper- 
ate efforts to save endangered lives, care of the 
battle-wounded or fatally diseased meet, from 
great and small, brutal and cultivated, deserved 
recognition, even to the extent of making the 
individual actors — so favored by the gods — 
famous, throughout the world. 

The patient service of men and women to 
their families, of children to their parents, or of 
friends who rejoice in serving, that goes on all 
around us conforms so entirely with our estab- 
lished ideals of what is right and becoming, that 
it is unnoticed and wins no applause, but 
oftener only calls out from the recipient de- 
mands for further sacrifice. 

In all such related service the real blessing 
comes to those who give far more than to those 
who receive. The operation of this law hallows 
all the relationships of this life, and must finally 
yield to the unselfish giver undreamed of com- 
pensations. Not here, perhaps, but in that 
sphere of being where love is indeed the fulfill- 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 81 

ing of the law, shall the patient givers, those 
who have served at love's altars, find them- 
selves closely allied to the immortal ones, "who 
do his pleasure." 

Love, garlanded, and adorned with all that 
wealth can bestow, enthroned in seats of honor, 
and social recognition is accepted as our ideal 
of what love should claim, and win from life; 
but I have looked into the faces of humble, 
patient toilers, and there I have seen that the 
sustaining influence with them was love, and 
have marvelled greatly over the compelling 
power of their ideals of love. 

Remembering that foundations of love upon 
this earthly planet were, of necessity, laid in 
the selfish instincts of the race — a race as yet 
so undeveloped in all that "makes for right- 
eousness" — we need not despair of the final 
outcome, and realization of its high behest to 
the children of men; for no expression of love, 
however mean in view of our own exalted 
ideals, but is, in reality, an effort towards some- 
thing higher and better. The obdurate and 
selfish are unfolded, and taught by its painful 
misunderstandings, and awful tragedies. 

Those poor souls who expect everything from 
this life, whose ideals are bounded by their own 
selfishness, who have never discovered that God 
is Love, and that only through love, purified, 
exalted and idealized can any of his earthly 
children ever reach to any conscious relation- 



82 INSIGHTS AND HEKESIES 

ship with our Father in Heaven, and who, fail- 
ing to realize even their low ideals, pass on 
from one experience to another vainly search- 
ing for the realization of what their dimly per- 
ceived intuitions of love constantly assure them 
should be theirs — for even such as these there 
must be a final redemption ; for, like one of old, 
they have ' ' loved much, ' ' and the sins of a vast 
ignorance are at last condoned by God's all 
pervading, untiring, illimitable law of love. 

ye! who labor for humanity's uplifting; 
weary workers in the homely ways of the 
unskilled in every relationship of life, unrec- 
ognized by your fellows be ye of good cheer! 
As the circling waves of a calm lake spread 
wider, and more widely from a center disturbed 
by some heavy substance, so shall your least 
word, or thought of pure, unselfish love, from 
your overburdened lives, reach out and diffuse 
an influence throughout the universe of God, 
and become a part of the life immortal ! 

Love, and love alone creates the desire for 
immortality, lifts up and renews the oft faint- 
ing faith, the faltering, changeful hope, and 
perpetuates the expectations of the restoration 
of beloved companions, the reunion of families, 
and friends. It inspires the spirit, and seals 
the brokenhearted to the service of " ideal 
love." It leads the human soul onward, and 
upward, until it triumphs, at last, over this 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 83 

life's defeats and losses, and its manifold 
despairs. 

Undeterred by the alarms of war, the wails 
of the diseased and famine-ciirsed, and the 
violent protests of the oppressed, and misery- 
steeped unfortunates of this plane of being, the 
"Prince of Peace" is calling together his 
scattered forces. The beacon lights shine along 
the high places where dwell the exalted, and 
powerful ones of earth, and glimmer faintly 
from the lowlands, where the dire enemies of 
mankind — ignorance and superstition — are, at 
last, learning that God, the true God, loves, and 
cannot hate. 

The "ground-swell" of the "ideal love" can- 
not be resisted, nor overborne by any compet- 
ing power in the universe, and with ever-increas- 
ing force and power to conquer all of earth's 
conditions of unrest, and dissatisfaction, born 
of false ideals, it will sweep resistlessly on, until 
it is merged in God. The recognition of the 
homogeneity of the race, and the "Fatherhood 
of God," shall bring the longed for fulfillment 
of the ancient prophecy of "Peace on Earth, 
and good will to Man." 



The priests endowed the gods with vices 
which they knew to be popular among their rich 
and powerful patrons. 



84 INSIGHTS AND HEKESIES 



THE NEEDS OF WOMAN. 

Women need any and all disciplines which, 
teach them self-justice. There are many noble 
and good women who allow their whole lives to 
be picked away from them by demands upon 
their time and strength which come to them 
under the guise of duties. Viewed from a 
higher standpoint, they are not duties, in that 
they conflict with the great underlying princi- 
ple of self -justice. This is the pivotal idea of 
a true religion; for it is impossible to be true, 
to be just to others save as we are so to our- 
selves, and while no character can be perfected, 
except through the fiery ordeal of an entire self- 
abnegation, there is a higher, and a holier life 
in store for those who have the strength, and 
the courage to plant their feet upon this God- 
given and eternal law of justice to self. 

It is comparatively easy to gird one's self for 
the conflict which is apparent, nearly all women 
souls are equal to that heroism; but it is in the 
daily round of the household, in relation to the 
church, and to society, or to the professions 
where women need to watch most jealously the 
weakness of self-sacrifice. Women have had 
the beauty of ' ' unselfishness, ' ' and ' i amiability" 
dinned into their ears for so long that there is 
no depth of degradation, or of abnegation of 
true womanhood to which they will not descend 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 85 

for the sake of being so considered by those 
whose interest it is to keep them where they 
virtually endorse the vices of others by their 
own lack of self -justice. While we must grope 
along until we understand the wickedness of 
this, and until we outgrow that weakness, let us 
be ready for, and equal to the hour which shall 
give us the laurels of the victor. And why not 
laurels ? Has it not been uttered by the mouth 
of inspired prophecy that the "last shall be 
first," and that "the stone rejected by the 
builders shall yet be the head of the corner?" 
It rests with us, individually, to represent that 
truthfulness, and faithful adherence to the 
justice due to womanhood which shall yet crown 
her with rejoicing. 

To this end women must begin to gather in 
those pearls of unselfish devotion and self- 
abnegation which they have been so recklessly 
casting under the feet of ignorance and beastli- 
ness. 

It is blessed for lovely and loving woman to 
bestow bountifully from the richness of her 
nature. But every grace has its complement, 
and the complement of this, for the present, is 
the greater blessing of conserving herself until 
she knows her power as an individual, and 
thoroughly comprehends what is due to her 
dignity and worth. 



86 INSIGHTS AND HEEESIES 



MAN VERSUS WOMAN. 

Man, living entirely in his physical nature, 
goes on and on in the gratification of the senses 
until he becomes satiated, and " blase," and 
there is nothing satisfactory left for him upon 
the sensuous plane. Then he either crystallizes 
into a hard, selfish being, or plunges still deeper 
into the slough of sensuality from which Divine 
Love alone can rescue him. This power is most 
often manifested by woman, the natural law- 
giver and redeemer. For ages man has pro- 
jected his selfish human will into all the affairs 
of life, thus setting aside the higher law. In 
the love relations he has specially dominated 
woman, reversing the divine order of nature, 
and thus killing out all possible inspiration, and 
consequent happiness. Everywhere he has set 
up his own lustful desires as the rule and right 
of life in his relationship to woman, destroying 
the spiritual sacrament of marriage ; and by his 
selfishness and greed of power, he has reduced 
her to a condition of prostitution. He outrages 
the helpless ones who have confided their honor, 
and their lives to his keeping, and the law — the 
vile, cursed, man-made law — upholds him in this 
slaughter of all that should make his heaven of 
trusting love. The wails of the wronged ones 
— specially those who suffer in the marriage 
relation — go up incessantly to God, and the woe 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 87 

of the children who, through these conditions, 
have inherited only animal love and instinct is 
enough to drown the ' ' music of the spheres. ' ' 

Parenthood being one phase of unfoldment, 
each individual must at some period of incarna- 
tion exercise this important function. To the 
uses of reproduction, the animal love with its 
blustering activities of expression, is, rightly 
understood, adjusted. But above and beyond 
this is the spiritual union which brings forth 
children of the mind, the fruitage of the soul, 
manifest in noble thoughts and brave deeds. 
Every expression of love, however crude and 
animal, is an impulsion of the flesh-enveloped 
soul toward the source of all love, and however 
distasteful one may seem, to such as have 
evolved a spiritual consciousness, and the de- 
mand for soul satisfaction, it cannot be ignored. 

Through the pain of satiety, of disease, or 
suspended activity of the love nature, the ego 
at last senses its need of God. It comes to 
know that nothing less than divine love can 
ever satisfy this demand of the heart. The 
constant tendency of the inspired human being 
is to extremes. The "golden mean" is the 
"high water mark" of real cultivation. We 
have on one side the suppression of the ascetic, 
and at the other end of the line the abandon- 
ment of the debauchee — both sinful and false 
because extreme, both casting a reproach upon 
the laws of God as outworked in, and through 



88 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

nature. The ascetic, seeing the harmful results 
to the soul attending the usual unlimited, and 
undisciplined expression of nature which man 
accords to his supposed necessities, draws the 
line by cutting off all surplus of physical sup- 
plies and, stifling the cries of passion, retires 
into a cave or cell, and into himself, thus totally 
ignoring all the necessary activities attending 
the development of this planet and of the human 
race. He may thus reach a high altitude of 
purely spiritual perception; but it is, after all, 
a sublimated selfishness. His example is of no 
benefit to the world's workers. He is not of 
those who think and feel, and who are in the 
way of divulging esoteric knowledges to the 
quest of the vast army of earnest seekers after 
light upon these underlying laws of human life. 
For the control by man of the love, and the 
life of woman there is a cut-and-dried senti- 
ment and an enforced law concerning the 
segregated exercise of a natural function. By 
her acceptance, or rejection of this onesided 
"morale," is woman judged pure or impure, 
blessed or cursed, as the case may be. If this rule 
could be enforced equally upon both sexes, if 
there were not two distinct sets of moral laws, 
one for man, and quite another for woman, 
there would be no such injustice. As it is, there 
is but one way left open for woman. She must 
develop the power and will to be a law unto 
herself, regardless of the suspicion, and brutal- 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 89 

ity of man, and with this also indifference to 
the foolness and the weak protest of her fel- 
low slaves — women. These are "long, long 
thoughts." Ages must elapse ere the males of 
our kind will have evoluted up to a status where 
they will see that through justice to woman 
alone can they secure to themselves any degree 
of worthy, or lasting happiness, or satisfaction. 

NATUEAL CETJELTY OF THE 
UNDEVELOPED. 

The most unaccountable phase of the minds 
of the leaders of religions has been their per- 
sistent effort to make their fellow beings 
wretched and miserable instead of glad and 
happy. We expect savagery from the Coman- 
chee Indians and other primitive tribes and 
races; but from self-styled Christians the his- 
tory of their cruelties is astounding. It is pure 
devil worship — that is what it is — if they but 
knew it. 

One of the beautiful plans of theologians and 
priests for scaring half-witted people into their 
individual folds has been telling them that they 
were in danger of committing the most dreadful 
of all sins, the "sin against the Holy Ghost." 
The utterly "unpardonable sin" of all sins. 
This blasphemous, fiendish proposition has 
frightened numbers of half-baked folks, and 
they have pestered their small modicum of 



90 INSIGHTS AND HEEESIES 

brains over this mysterious say-so of priests 
and parsons even to the point of committing 
suicide, or of landing themselves in lunatic 
asylums. 

THE WORST SIN. 

The much speculated over "sin against the 
Holy Ghost," the so-called "unpardonable sin" 
is the sin that men and women commit against 
themselves; for the most holy of all ghosts, or 
spirits, is that portion of God — the universal 
Spirit — embodied in their own separate person- 
alities, and it is only "unpardonable" in that it 
sets the soul back from its possible and intended 
progress toward its ultimate perfection. 

REINCARNATION. 

The objections to the acceptance of a belief 
in the law of reincarnation are based upon the 
imperfect teaching, and the consequent inad- 
equate understanding of the laws controlling 
such experiences. 

Some of the reasons for disbelief are utterly 
illogical. For instance, one view is this: "I 
never want to come back to this earth after I 
once leave it." The fact is, that there could 
be no return to today's recognized conditions of 
life. If one were to return to this planet and 
become reembodied, he would find himself in 



EVOLUTION" OF THE SOUL 91 

some other country, and under such entirely 
changed conditions that he would be totally 
unconscious of being on the same world where 
he had formerly lived. Then, again, the law of 
vibration is so immanent in material things, the 
changes are so constantly undermining condi- 
tions and setting up quite others that if one were 
to return in one hundred or even in fifty years, 
it could not be the same, and that person could 
not be in any way subject to the same condi- 
tions, or to the same experiences. 

Furthermore, it is nature's wise and provi- 
dent law that there is hardly ever any memory 
of any previous life here. Still, after the soul 
has passed through many lives and has accum- 
ulated great knowledge, a vast consciousness 
which can not be laid aside, there come to in- 
dividual souls faint gleams of memories of past 
experiences which, if heeded or understood, 
might become helpful and instructive, if not 
altogether consoling. 

There has never been a time when the 
needs of humanity have so reached the great 
spiritual everlords of this planet as at present. 
Or, that those needs have been so responded to 
by the return to earth of wise, and godlike 
spirits as now. Many of these have sought to 
approach humanity through personal reembodi- 
ment in the flesh. It would be well for the 
world if, instead of cramming the brains of chil- 
dren with effete ideas and superstitions, the 



92 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

messages of these wise ones could be listened 
to and heeded. 

A thorough understanding of the laws of re- 
embodiment, so far as we can know them, 
entirely refutes the belief and the feeling of the 
injustice of the Creator towards any human 
being. The law of evolution carries the soul 
along from one expression of life to another 
giving to each individual the opportunity to 
accumulate such knowledge, and to grow such 
character as shall finally bring it to a state of 
perfection. The discrepancies in human life are 
largely external. The millionaire, envied by 
less fortunate beings, may be far below the 
poor, struggling laborer in point of real unfold- 
ment of soul. And again, people so favored in 
this material experience of life may be forced 
by the very nature of existence to return into 
humble conditions to learn the real lessons of 
life here. 

We are not the arbiters of our own destiny, 
and the sooner we conceive the idea of non- 
resistence to fate, realize that our lives are 
guided by unerring law, and simply set our- 
selves to trying to understand the meanings of 
our experiences, and to trying to wring from 
each one all that it is intended to teach us, seek- 
ing to learn from it all that we possibly can in 
order that we may not be forced to be taught 
the lessons over again, the better for our growth 
and happiness. 



EVOLUTION" OF THE SOUL 93 

This earth, our birth place, our kindergarten 
school, and the university from which we must 
each graduate, having once received us, can 
never let go its hold upon one of its children 
until this final result is attained. Over and 
over again, the lives of all who belong to this 
planet pass into the invisible realms of Nature 
to rest from the sordid and wearisome experi- 
ences of material life, and again return to seek 
out further growth and understanding, until the 
final culmination is reached. The soul is 
hurried on through it's experiences of departing 
and returning, until earth has no further les- 
son, no further service to perform. Then, 
indeed, it may graduate and ascend to its place 
among the gods. 



Newly-embodied souls might be considered as 
raw material flung out upon the sea of life to 
be ground and polished by experience, and 
grown into a semblance of perfection befitting 
the "children of God." 

PEOCESSES OF EEINCAENATION. 

Spirit has no consciousness on the material 
plane, except through the vibratory action of 
the human brain, the mortal mind. The individ- 
ual ego gathers up from each incarnation — if it 
is true to itself — some knowledge, some wisdom, 
and stores it away in the spirit brain. Its ex- 



■ 



94 INSIGHTS AND HEKESIES 

periences cover every opportunity to under- 
stand, from lowest to highest, all that any single 
one in the whole human family has ever known. 
This is the justice of the great Creator. The 
king today has been in some previous life an op- 
pressed laborer, and if he could for a moment 
lay aside his egotistical pride of power and 
place, he might remember and know how 'tis 
himself. Men and women of thought, of great 
character have returned from each separate 
incarnation, for rest from the destroyed phy- 
sical, loaded like the honey bee with the results 
of labor and effort. 

When the practised soul familiarizes itself 
with the newly-born, fleshly tabernacle it is to 
inhabit and use for a long or a short time, it 
broods over the unconscious being, and at the 
first indication of intelligence, pours into the 
human brain-cells its own spiritual life, and 
what thus comes in is there to stay. The 
growth of the child, the development of the in- 
dividual, depends mostly upon the capacity of 
the brain to receive and adjust this knowledge 
and inspiration to its use upon the earth plane 
upon which it is to live, the place, the environ- 
ment in which it is to learn its next needed les- 
sons. 

The soul, the ego, thus placed, is bound and 
shackled by its human heredity. This is in- 
evitable, it has no choice as to its lineaments or 
figure. It in a sense bears the "sins of the 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 95 

world"; it can in no way separate itself, really, 
from the whole human family. 

When the experiences of the dual nature, the 
body and soul, from any cause, bring the body, 
or the brain into conditions where it can no 
longer respond to the uses of the spirit, then 
occurs what is called death — physical dissolu- 
tion. But this change is simply the unclothing 
of the spirit from its earthly conditions, setting 
it free to return again to its home, there to 
review what it has gained, and added to its pre- 
vious stock of knowledge. The individual soul 
in each incarnation forms for itself ties more or 
less real and lasting — with the mother, the 
fleshly vehicle, through whose mysterious ser- 
vice it enters upon its earthly life ; with the male 
parent whose service to humanity may, or may 
not be god]y or godlike, though natural and 
necessary; with family relations; and with 
friends, public and private. Nearly every per- 
son who passes through this unveiling comes to 
the grave-side with trains of friends to whom 
he is attached, and whom he will not forget, and 
he will stay on and on in his heaven till every 
claim upon his love, or service is fully satisfied. 
No more severing of ties; no more broken 
hearts, or disappointed hopes. No injustice, 
full fruition in heaven. 

This adjustment measured by earthly reckon- 
ing may take long reaches of time, but finally, 
the soul, stirred by the eternal law of progress, 



96 H5TSIGHTS AETD HEEESIES 

of unfoldment, repeats its former experience, 
drinks of the cup of forgetfulness, and returns 
again to learn in the great university of unfold- 
ing life on this planet. A vast multitude, it is 
coming and going, unceasingly moving on. No 
two alike ; each in its place pressing forward to 
the station which the totality of its experiences 
through many lives entitles it. There is but one 
law, but one method that abides. It is the 
spiritual law of evolution; everyone is held by 
it ; all who seem exempt today from its influence 
upon their lives, have already passed the crucial 
tests, or are traveling forward to meet them. 

Sooner or later every human soul must in- 
evitably take its turn, until it passes up through 
the whole gamut of earthly experience. What- 
ever character anyone achieves belongs to the 
individual eternally. It is the reward of patient 
service, of consecrated effort for the truth. 
Great souls are what they are, in the places they 
now occupy by virtue of their many incarna- 
tions. Through the great variety of experi- 
ences gained, they have come to know. They 
have earned the right to be what they are. 
There are usurpers in all the ways of life, igno- 
rance and hypocracy masquerading as the real 
thing, but they do not last. Pretenders are 
soon unmasked and taken at their true value. 

Sometimes the spirit is strong enough to 
ignore its present surroundings and rise above 
all the obstacles connected with its material 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 97 

heredity. It depends upon the unfoldment of 
the spirit whether it shall espouse the cause of 
progress and truth, or yield to the pressure of 
its environment and shrink back into a lower 
grade, and lose the opportunity for further 
growth. 

EDUCATION OF CHILDREN. 

Nearly all so-called civilized people set to 
work to cram the minds of their children, at the 
first indication of any degree of intelligence, 
with a religious bias such as they themselves 
have inherited or have been taught. Then the 
intellect must be shaped, forced and driven into 
accepted moulds, and the human being is con- 
sidered ready to be turned out into the world 
to fight the battle which everyone, in one way 
or another, must fight all along the way of 
human life — to begin to test the value of the 
ideas and principles with which the soul has 
been furnished to meet all the exigencies inci- 
dent to the pilgrimage from birth to the final 
exit from this state of being. It has taken un- 
counted ages to produce the perfected types of 
physical humanity we see on earth today. Here 
Nature calls a halt, saying: "As the handmaid, 
the co-worker with your Creator, I have brought 
you along to the point where you look and seem 
almost as gods. There is in each of you a divine 
ego — a thought of your Creator — a sure guide 



98 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

to perfection. To reach this goal must be now 
your constant endeavor. There is a spiritual 
body, the outgrowth of the physical. ' ' 

Thousands of children, too young to choose 
for themselves, are being fettered in spirit by 
the chains of old, effete superstitions; their 
intellects are being stultified by the absorption 
of narrowing creeds and vulgarizing ideas of 
God and his universe. There are numbers of 
Spiritualists and "liberal" men and women 
who expose the tender minds of their children to 
these same influences for society's sake, know- 
ing though they do, from hard experience, what 
an effort it costs to free the mind of such serious 
bias, and re-educate it aright. 



The noblest teaching is that which puts us 
en rapport with our own inner, unspoken and 
unrecognized perceptions. No truth, however 
manifested, can adjust itself to our soul's needs, 
save as it finds in us a response through that 
preparation which comes from a certain degree 
of previous knowledge. 

EGOTISM. 

Egotism is the perception, and recognition by 
individuals of the rights and the possibilities of 
their real selves, their ego. Without it human 
beings would not stand up on their hind legs^ 
they would crawl. It is at the same time a 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 99 

necessity and a danger. It has never been 
settled which is cause and which effect, whether 
insanity creates the awful manifestations of 
egotism or the unbalanced egotism induces in- 
sanity. "Keep us sane" is the wisest of all 
prayers, the greatest demand one can make 
upon his consciousness. 

People pass into the spirit world in the full 
bloom of their egotism; hordes of them return 
to tell their friends things they know absolutely 
nothing about, and the folks on this side believe 
all they say, and so fool ignorance is passed 
along and stays in the minds of those who listen 
to the "messages" of egotism and ignorance. 
There are "dead loads" of people who think 
this is all there is of Spiritualism. While it is 
blessed that friends can return, and comfort the 
mourning ones by their assurances of remem- 
brance and love, this should never be the final 
result sought for. Those who have lived but a 
limited time in the spirit world — the world of 
causes, of law — cannot teach people here the 
knowledge that can satisfy their souls. But 
there are educated souls, who have once lived 
honored and useful lives here, who are only too 
glad to respond to the needs of inquiring human- 
ity, teaching them the ways of wisdom, and lift- 
ing them out of ignorance and darkness into the 
light. 



100 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 



RESPONSIVENESS. 

Surely we are trying to solve tlie biggest 
problems before the class. The people who are 
our profoundest teachers, through whom come 
our largest experiences and knowledge are often 
most unconscious of their influence on other 
minds; and this is lawful, for the moment a 
human soul begins to wriggle either from 
anxiety or egotism, the divine "chemical affini- 
ties" are disturbed. 

Long before we get up to God, our nearer 
relative, "Mother Nature," is most gracious in 
her methods of unf oldment, standing ever ready 
to whisper in the devoted, or willing ear, her 
"open sesame" to the manifold workings of her 
secret laws. It is ever the same old exhorta- 
tion: "Seek and ye shall find," "Knock and 
it shall be opened to you," and the most won- 
derful of all is, the amount of unexpected tes- 
timony, and endorsement which she will con- 
trive to bring to bear to prove to you the truth 
of what she asserts through your own individ- 
ual experience. 

"Elective affinities" hold their own royally. 
You shall think and feel deeply, and the first 
friend you meet shall tell you — quite sponta- 
neously — of his ponderings which tally with 
your own, never suspecting that they are held 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 101 

to you by a subtle, and beautiful chemistry, the 
response of soul to soul. 

There is but one integral law. All others are 
but its radiations. The natural tendency of the 
human mind is ever toward being satisfied with 
its present limitations, instead of which we 
ought to constantly exercise our will and 
aspiration to fling off the mists of prejudice 
which so easily envelop the soul, and strive 
ever to enlarge our horizon, and push on to 
higher and better things. 

HELL. 

Such men as J. Knox in Scotland and J. 
Edwards in this country must have had chronic 
indigestion or cancers in their insides, or they 
could not have revelled so in hell, and "eternal 
damnation" as they did. What unreckoned 
miseries would surely have been spared their 
listeners if they, and thousands of their sort, 
could have developed a modicum of Christian 
feeling and a little kindness toward their hypno- 
tized hearers ! 

Not only from their immediate, personal 
teachings came awful fears of what must be 
the fate of all who were under the judgment as 
set forth by the unbalanced minds of such as 
these; but the long ineradicable chain of in- 
fluences that haunt, and torture the minds of 
good folks, even to this day. The utter lack of 



102 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

wisdom and knowledge of God's laws and 
providence, in the realm of theological teach- 
ings, is undoubtedly the cause of much of the 
diablerie of the world today. 

If all the priests and parsons who have ever 
infested this earth with their blasphemous 
theology were to unite their fiendish forces in a 
concentrated effort to doom one human soul — 
one spirit — to be burned forever in the endless 
hell fires which they have so long exulted in 
holding up over poor, wretched, ignorant peo- 
ples, they could not do it! They have had a 
glorious time persecuting, torturing, burning 
and slaying human bodies, driving millions of 
innocent inhabitants off the planet, who had 
just as much right to this — their home — as had, 
or can ever have any set of bloodthirsty ruffians, 
claiming their commissions from God Al- 
mighty ! How thoughtless, expecting the relig- 
ionists to put aside this, their most cherished 
dogma, of "eternal punishment in hell fires!" 
What would they have left to scare folks with, 
and make them hand over their dollars, and 
what, what! vent could they have for their 
own natural, pure cussedness ? 

THE COMMONPLACE. 

Great is the god Commonplace, and his 
prophets of the accredited order of the "Com- 
mon, ornary Kusses" are legion. They are of 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 103 

both sexes and of every race, age and condition. 
Consent to render homage to their Deity by 
confessing by word and deed that every man 
is as good as another and better too, and they 
will continue to smile openly ; but, in secret, they 
will prey upon you. Their capable emissaries go 
around with measuring line and shears, alert to 
discover, and ready to reduce to the proper 
dimensions anyone who shall dare to outgrow 
their prescribed proportions. You can never 
know when you are safe from their incursions. 
The dignified old man who sits next you at 
your hotel table seeming to be entirely preoc- 
cupied by the discussion of his dinner, may only 
be biding his time, waiting an excuse to deliver 
you over to their insatiable maw, to be dealt 
with according to the rules of their society. Or, 
perhaps the lady who in the first flush of your 
acquaintance quite dazzles you with her fluent 
chat upon multitudinous topics, suddenly, upon 
finding you unguardedly expressing opinions 
not approved by the high priests of medioc- 
rity, lets fall her mask, and shows herself to 
your astonished gaze a secret emissary, a 
determined servant of their most ancient and 
established order. "Thus far," so far as we 
can accompany you, "shalt thou go and no 
farther" at your peril. Woe to the soul that 
yields a ready obedience to the master's voice, 
that is ever calling to all who can hear: "Come 
up higher." The sash with which he would 



104 INSIGHTS AND HEKESIES 

gird up his loins, "the latchet" with which he 
tightens his sandals that he may run more 
swiftly the race set before him, the staff npon 
which he would lean shall all be turned by these 
demon worshippers into scourges. He shall be 
"beaten with many stripes/' for so it hath been 
ordained from long time, until the pain of his 
wounded heart and hurt brain shall deaden his 
sensibilities so that he can no more hear the 
voice nor see the helping hand. 

Defy, resist, and the limp, sprawling, accom- 
modating God becomes a sinuous, hydracrested, 
overpowering dragon, stopping at nothing to 
"put you where you belong" — his favorite bat- 
tle cry — himself judge, jury and executioner. 
This he has not the power to do unless he can 
prove to you that you "belong" where he seeks 
to place you, for his veins are full of mud. He 
is of the "earth earthy," and in the rarified 
atmosphere of noble ambition and great 
achievements, he is utterly blind and of no 
account. Take heart, then, aspiring soul! 
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is 
good." Render unto every true principle that 
which is its due; but beware how you worship 
or lean upon teachers, leaders who, beneath 
their proudly-worn garb, and insignia of leader- 
ship, may be all the time wearing the robes of 
the high priests of the god Commonplace. 



EVOLUTION- OF THE SOUL 105 



PETBOLEUM. 

" i Pears like" the affairs of life on this planet 
are dreadfully "higgledy-piggledy"; but in 
reality, there is a divine purpose, a use in it all. 
It is the soul's kindergarten. It is interesting 
to observe the curious and round-about ways 
Nature takes to insure the greatest good to the 
greatest number of her needy children. Long 
before the first nitro-glycerine "go-devil" was 
sent down, down, to the uttermost depths, to 
shatter the oil-bearing rock, and set free the 
wonderful deposit that was destined to mark a 
new era in the affairs of men, rang out the 
Biblical mandate: "Let there be light," and 
in due time the whole world was illuminated. 

The sorcerers, who have abstracted vast 
wealth from this earth product have fancied it 
was for their special benefit and use, that nature 
had garnered up her stores to be thus liberated, 
and chemicalized into a thousand forms, by 
their sagacious work. Not so! Quite indeed, 
not so ! 

Came — at last — the kerosene lamp. How 
marvelous the light of its clear flame, after 
"tallow dips" and "pine knots"! How the 
little lamp of the first experiment grew, 
and grew into gorgeous centers of sun-like 
radiance, shining everywhere, illuminating 
hitherto darkened, impenetrable places, carry- 



106 IISTSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

ing the torch of civilization round the entire 
world. Alike in slum and palace, in homes of 
poverty, and set to shine in the gilded resorts 
of the noble and wealthy; blessing the student, 
and the vast army of enforced workers; light- 
ing the paths of men, and the ways of the multi- 
tude; making vice and crime more difficult, by 
dispersing the darkness from hidden purlieus. 
Through primeval depths and mountain fast- 
nesses, wherever the footsteps of men have 
wandered, the magic lamp has pioneered the 
way. 

All war is horrible. Through what agonies 
of loss, and orgies of death, and tortures of the 
weak driven to the wall by unscrupulous men 
the war against material darkness on this planet 
has been carried on is utterly unimaginable and 
impossible ever to be known. The end has been 
reached, the great needs of humanity at large 
have been and are being served, and while 
superior sources of light have largely taken the 
place of the oil lamp, it still shines calmly on in 
the homes of the poor, and will, for ages yet to 
come. 



"As a man thinketh, so is he." This may be 
only measurably true, in consequence of the 
stress of circumstances ; but sooner or later, the 
thought moulds the individual beyond the power 
of disguising the real character. 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 107 



LAW. 

It was all in order for Yahweh, the guardian 
spirit of the Hebrew race, to "hetchel" the 
Jews — and from all accounts they needed it — 
but the most anomalous phase of this whole 
affair consists in the fact that after having set 
forth to the world that the church, and all were 
to come under the rule of the "new dispensa- 
tion," and represent the teachings of the 
Master, they should turn back to the old, old 
history of the Jews, and incorporate bodily into 
the so-called Christian religion, and into the 
political life and jurisprudence of nations, the 
restrictions, the penalties, and, in a word, the 
Hebraic law in its entirety. Law, as it is ap- 
plied in America, is a process lacking in equity 
and justice. It is circumvented by $-s for the 
benefit of the rich, a menace to the poor man, 
binding on the needy burdens that kill, or lead 
to despair. Jesus Christ did not make law; he 
only indicated the presence of the higher law — 
the scientific law — that must rule all life on this 
planet ere justice to all can ever prevail. 

The gospel of Jesus — the Nazarene — was the 
first that ever brought hope or promise of any 
possible good to the outcast, and the children of 
poverty. 



108 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 



COMMUNISM. 

Communism is the beginning, and not the 
culminating state of societies and peoples. All 
efforts on this line fail, because they are based 
upon the false and impossible premise of the ab- 
solute equality of all men. There never has been, 
there never can be any such adjustment of the 
forces of nature on this planet ; because no two 
souls are alike and there can only be equality in 
alikeness. Spirits come here in groups. They 
start simultaneously on their pilgrimage across 
the " sands of time"; but at the very outset 
there are obstacles and handicaps innumerable. 
At once there is heredity. There is no equality 
in heredity. It is good, bad or indifferent as 
the case may be. But the great divergence is in 
the soul itself; it grovels or aspires, and unfolds 
its powers according to the laws of its own in- 
dividual being, and all men, and women should 
not be held accountable or judged alike. It is 
not just. Communism would seek to suppress 
all individuality and reduce everyone to the 
"dead level" of the commonplace, under the 
mistaken idea of universal equality. Gifted 
persons daring to lift up their heads above the 
common ruck of mankind, are at once shoved 
back into the narrow groove the heads of the 
cult have decided to be the proper rut for human 
beings to run in. 



EVOLUTION* OF THE SOUL 109 

In this view, persons of ignoble and narrow 
natures may sit in judgment upon people of 
genius and refinement, and may force back the 
most aspiring seer into expressionless life by 
the utter lack of any comprehension by their 
dull, selfish fancy. Ye gods ! How they exult in 
doing it! This trick is played upon sensitive, 
modest, gifted people everywhere. Fools set 
the pace and rule, and those who know the least 
of the responsibilities of living are the first to 
rush forward and grab them up. Envy and 
jealousy have it all their own way, and so it is 
the world around; everyone is forced to pay a 
fearful price for his superiority. 

At different times poets and writers, good 
people of distinction and philanthropy, weary 
of the " storm and stress" of life and of inva- 
sions and intolerable "bumptiousness" of the 
vulgar and indiscriminating, have tried to 
secure a place and surroundings where high 
thinking and simple living might order their 
days and secure to them companionship fit for 
the gods ; but the noblest and best of humanity 
are not permitted to go off by themselves in 
such ways and have a little heaven on earth all 
to themselves. This cannot be. They must 
stand apart each in their place, out in the world 
— "in the open" — that they may each one stand 
as a beacon light, object lesson, leader, and thus 
assist in "leavening the whole lump" of igno- 
rant and unregenerate humanity. 



110 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 



HAPPINESS. 

Happiness is the final achievement of the 
human soul. Perfect happiness can only come 
as the result of absolute at-one-ment with God, 
the divine will, and in this conforming there is 
no loss of personality, or of individuality; it 
only rounds out the soul into its godlike com- 
pleteness. It is unimaginable that there should 
come loss of any attribute of the soul on its way 
up to the rendez-vous with its Parent, God. 
Rather, that its powers should increase in every 
possible direction with use, in conformity with 
divine law. This is the only true happiness. 

The ideals of happiness cherished by men 
take in an immensely wide range, and bring into 
action all the peculiar attributes of the compos- 
ite natures of man. The brutal instinct cries 
out : i l Kill ! kill ! ' ' Bloodsheding is its ravishing 
delight. When it arrives at a point where it 
may not destroy its fellows, the whole created 
animal kingdom — including woman — is its prey. 
Wars and rumors of wars will never cease on 
this planet until humanity at large develops out 
of this grade which expects to find happiness in 
the exercise of its very lowest, primitive 
instincts. 

Further along in the line of the evolution of 
the soul, ideals of happiness pursued by man 
are simply futile and childish; the awakening 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 111 

to a realization of this is a commonplace, world- 
wide experience, and only repeated embodi- 
ments can purge the soul, edncate the minds of 
men, and turn their attention to the only true 
and lasting ideals of happiness. 

PAIN. 

Physical pain beyond a certain point ceases 
to be pain and becomes an ecstasy. The same 
beneficent law controls mental and spiritual 
agonies. They each have their limit. To the 
keenest of sorrows, the deepest of griefs our 
Maker has spoken: "Thus far shalt thou go, 
and no farther. ' ' Nurse them as we may, draw 
them as deeply as we can into our soul's re- 
cesses, and make them, in our morbid states, 
idols to cherish, they yet lose their power to 
hold our souls in subjection. 

Both physically and mentally, the nerves of 
feeling refuse to respond. They have their 
limitation, and time holds for every heart- 
breaking experience a consolation. If it were 
not so, this world would be turned into a vast, 
howling lunatic asylum. Unseen and unrecog- 
nized by stricken hearts, "The Angels of His, 
who do His pleasure ' ' stand ever ready to pour 
healing balm upon all our wounds, and to teach 
the great, eternal truth that afflictions are the 
real educators of the soul. 



112 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 



FOES IN THE HOUSEHOLD. 

"A man's foes shall be they of his own house- 
hold. " This saying referred to the religions 
differences which the great prophet saw wonld 
arise in consequence of his peculiar teachings. 
There are no ill feelings between people so 
rancorous and lasting as those which spring 
from such causes, and as hate is but love in- 
verted, the nearer and dearer the relationships, 
the more bitter is the feeling likely to be en- 
gendered. Proverbially, family feuds are the 
most deadly and difficult to eradicate. 

The friend, the relative who knows you best, 
who has seen you in your hours of weakness 
when you have been entirely ' i off guard, ' ' is the 
one who can most injure you should anything 
occur to sever your hearts. There is no help 
for this save in that growth of charity and 
forbearance one toward another which teaches 
us to seek not our own, but to try to help each 
other in the great struggle of life. 



Who are the "pure in heart?" Those who 
aspire to the good, and sacrifice self to attain it. 
What is virtue? That which is best for the in- 
dividual ; not on either the animal or the spirit- 
ual plane alone ; but in every lawful expression 
of the nature ; the epitomization, and spiritual- 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 113 

ization of all past " karma" from the sod up to 
God. 

THE INNER LIFE. 

How unreal seems the existence of the inner 
life ! How vain our intent to catch its meaning, 
and portray its deepest lessons, and yet, it is 
the reality. It forms the center around which 
all external life revolves, from which all out- 
ward being receives its vitality and assurance 
of existence. The passive soul heeds not the 
ever-recurring changes which its very continued 
life indicates, and will, when unveiled by the 
transforming hand of death, wonder at its 
wealth of life. The conscious being, ever alert, 
notes the changes and the indications of ever- 
progressing life with delight, and awe, and a 
profound recognition of the law of its being 
which sets the star of its existence higher and 
higher in the heavens, and lures it on for its 
own perfection even unto the perfect day. To 
such a soul there is little peace, or rest by the 
way ; but it may finally learn a godlike heroism 
and patience which will enable it to trace its 
steps, and see in all its life's experiences a 
sequence which is divine and beneficent. 



Power is silent; power does not fume and 
bluster. It holds firmly and steadily on its way, 
and wins by force of its resistless and relentless 
sway. 



114 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 



BOOT OF EVILS. 

The most unaccountable phase of philan- 
thropic effort put forth by good people for the 
help of humanity is their utter failure to apply 
their remedial suggestions, or helpful agencies 
to the real roots, or causes, of great matters 
needing attention. Everything is approached 
and dealt with entirely from the external. 
Either from ignorance or fear of the probable 
results to be met with upon close inspection, 
the beginnings, the real causes of evil doings 
are let alone to grow until they become unbear- 
able. Then comes the "hue and cry" joined in 
by all who seek to have wrongs righted. 

Such has been, and is the i ' white slave evil. ' ' 
Ignorance is the cause of all evil; but the spe- 
cial cause of this great, terrible, devastating 
wrong starts with the utter lack of the educa- 
tion of children by their parents, especially of 
the necessary instruction of girls regarding 
their own natural functions, and their relation- 
ship to men. The most vitally important 
knowledge that can ever be theirs is left entirely 
out of their home education, and the natural 
curiosity of the young left to the foolish igno- 
rance of their young mates, or of designing 
underlings. 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 115 

Woman is the magnet that draws souls to 
this life. 

BEST IN CHANGE. 

There is no method so surely successful in 
barring the progress of the soul as that of 
permitting a prejudice for one phase, or pre- 
sentation of occult law to so blind the percep- 
tions of the mind as to cause it to entirely dis- 
regard all such views as are not already set 
forth, and accepted. 

It is as the old story of the two who fought 
over the shield with a gold side and a silver 
side; because, as neither could see both sides 
at once, each considered the statement of the 
other a willful falsehood. Let us try, at least, 
to bear in mind that our relationship to this 
universe has been of long enough duration to 
permit of the evolution, and establishment of 
many series of laws which do not, as would seem 
at the first glance, conflict, or force us to a dis- 
belief in our own well-accredited experiences. 
The whole united universe is moving forward 
upon evolutionary lines, and what was, and is 
true in the beliefs of the East, must be today 
supplemented by the further knowledge re- 
vealed by the seers of the West. The extreme 
likeness which exists between the different 
religions of the world is everywhere apparent, 
and the devachan of the Theosophists corre- 



m 



116 



INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 



sponds to the expected rest in the tomb, until 
Gabriel sounds his horn on resurrection day of 
the orthodox Christian. 

The only way the priests knew to prevent the 
knowledge of their ignorance coming to their 
followers was to draw a veil over the future of 
the invisible soul, and promise a long, long rest 
to the weary and heavy-laden ones, to whom 
this, alone, seemed compensation for their 
earthly cares. 

People are just as tired today as they have 
ever been in the history of the world, but they 
are growing, through their superior knowledge 
of occult things, to see how to separate spirit 
and soul from matter, and to render unto each 
its just due in its proper sphere. In laying 
aside the physical body, and perceiving that the 
new life opening up before the spirit offers the 
truest possible rest to the enfranchised soul, 
through congenial activities, and obeying its 
behest finding a real heavenly experience 
through their recognition, and obedience to the 
undeviating law of uses. 



We do want God in the Constitution ; but not 
the God of any creed or ism, but of the great 
moral principles, the ethical philosophy taught 
by Jesus, the Christ. 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 117 



MISERLINESS. 

There is such a thing as being miserly of 
thoughts and ideas as well as of lucre. One 
is as foolish as the other. Circulation is neces- 
sary to health and comfortable living. Cast off 
the leading strings of other minds. Out of the 
abundance of thine own heart speak thine own 
truest, highest thoughts. Think not thy supply 
will fail, or that by withholding thou shalt in- 
crease thy store. It is not possible to make a 
corner in this realm, or to take out a mortgage 
on God's gifts. Freely ye have received, freely 
give and thy "measure shall be pressed down 
and running over." 

SPECIAL PROVIDENCE. 

If the absolute homogeneity of the race were 
once understood and established in the minds 
of men, it would put an end to the varying 
modes and methods of thought which now only 
tend to separate their minds and hearts. To 
know, to feel the unity of soul with souls, and 
of the minds of men with the Infinite would 
forever wipe out the discord and inharmony 
which now prevail everywhere. Not my err- 
ing, and human will, but thy Will of Wisdom 
and Love be done on earth as it is in heaven, 



• 



118 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

must be, finally, the attitude of every aspiring 
soul. 

Too long the Christian world has accepted 
the legendary Hebraic God, in the place of our 
real "Father who art in heaven." The teach- 
ings of Jesus — the testimony he gave of the love 
of God, if taken to the heart — must dispose for- 
ever of the perception of God as a Being of 
cruelty and revenge, and given over to low 
attributes. The Creator of the universe — 
"without whom was nothing made" — manifests 
to us through the action of eternal and un- 
changeable law. This is demonstrated to us by 
and through his vice-gerents, the angels of his 
who do his pleasure. Down, down from the 
supernal regions, from the supernal plane of 
being, comes the Divine Mandate which is made 
known to the human soul through the instru- 
mentality that can penetrate the surroundings, 
and best make manifest the inspiration, the 
warning, or the perception of the undeviating 
law which holds all human experience and its 
sure results in its care and keeping. And those 
who dwell upon the threshold of the door which 
opens upon the life eternal are those who have 
loved and who still do love the children of 
earth — fathers, mothers, children, friends who 
have walked the earth by our sides, and whom 
no starry crowns, and no glorious heaven could 
tempt away from the work of blessing and 
comforting the sorrowing souls still left on 



EVOLUTION OE THE SOUL 119 

earth to mourn the loss of their loving com- 
panionship, and sympathy. And this is God's 
"Special Providence" made manifest in our 
lives whenever and wherever we have eyes to 
see and ears to hear. 



Once the soul really looks forth and sees, 
there can be, after that, no more sleeping. All 
is effort, weighing, balancing, deciding, grop- 
ing painfully along, or running swiftly the race, 
bracing against fearful odds, or bravely out- 
riding the storm. Taking it all as it comes, it 
is increasing action, motion, change. 

HUMAN DESTINY. 

Confucius, long considered the oldest and 
wisest of all the ancient teachers, when he was 
consulted upon an abtruse point of ethics, said 
in effect : ' i Ask the ancients. I do not know. ' ' 
The results of modern research are constantly 
undermining the first-recorded ideas concern- 
ing the age, and the degree of scientific and 
religious culture of the race, and we may well 
feel like turning from the authenticated his- 
torical records with which we are familiar to 
ask of the old, old world the occult meanings of 
the messages graven on pillar and on chiselled 
stone. The records which have survived the 
storm and stress of the ages bringing down to 
us unexpected knowledge of the lives, the 



120 INSIGHTS AlsTD HEEESIES 

achievements, and the histories of far-off, long- 
buried, hidden and lost peoples, communities, 
and even distinct personalities, were carefully 
planned and exactly executed by those who, 
already perceiving the mutability of all human 
life, and all its affairs, who — in a word — realiz- 
ing that "the fashion of this world passeth 
away," sought to immortalize and perpetuate 
forever an absolute history of their own, and 
kindred races, by the uprearing of vast, 
imperishable monuments and temples, and 
abodes of men. The pyramids, majestic rock- 
hewn places of worship, and subterranean 
crypts are but the fingerposts of destiny. The 
voice of the weird spirit of "Memnon" who sits 
enthroned within the awful wastes of the desert 
sands, moans on and on, ever the same awe- 
inspiring warning. "Listen, listen, vain, 
evanescent, puerile chrysalis, man! Such as 
thou art, so were these most ancient of days 
over the history of whose toilsome, groping 
lives we keep forever jealous watch and ward. 
As they are today, so shall ye become. A little 
space, a few cycles of time, and all that lives 
and stalks abroad in the full plentitude of 
energy and ambition shall become resolved into 
the unfathomable the unreadable mysteries of 
the ages." 

Not after such fashion shall we of this age 
of widespread enlightenment write our history 
on the annals of the planet's life, and evolution. 



EVOLUTION" OF THE SOUL 121 

All that has gone before this time — the closing 
in of the vast cycle — has been, in a way, frag- 
mentary, comet-like ; the whole race of mankind 
has marched around the globe again and again. 
The leaders — the head — were the favored few, 
priests and kings, warriors and nobles ; the vast 
tail, the untaught, the unawakened, the igno- 
rant, servile masses, the grovelling slaves, but 
a remove from the beasts of burden. 

The spur of necessity, the development of 
ambition, and avarice, and the unfolding of the 
ego in man forced him along upon unknown 
paths, kept him separate from his kind, and 
built up the distinct races, in order that the 
individuality of each might become distinctly 
marked and recognized, that each, in his own 
special environment, might become the highest 
possible expression of what climate, soil and 
other influences, incident to the natural 
heredity could evolve in the lives and beings of 
given races of men. It is as though Nature 
had disported herself in bringing to life an 
infinite variety and diversity among her per- 
fected children. But men, here and there, have 
always shown the golden cord of kinship to 
astonish and bewilder the unwary and unthink- 
ing. 

The virtue and honor of a race are considered 
mere superstition and a perpetuation of injus- 
tice and wrong, or are accepted as a lesson in 
charity and brotherhood. Thus is ever grow- 



mmm 



122 



INSIGHTS AND HEEESIES 



ing and becoming established the entire homo- 
geneity of the race. We have girded the earth, 
and established our fiery rale in the depths of 
the seas ; the time for the fulfilling of a proph- 
ecy far reaching in its results is even now at 
hand. "That which is spoken in the closets, 
shall be shouted from the housetops." Far 
and wide it is whispered in secret places, lest 
it be known of selfish greed or ambitious 
tyranny, and this it is that the human heart 
conceives, and human lips proclaim: "Liberty! 
liberty ! ! liberty ! ! ! ' ' Room for noble thought, 
freedom for grand and acceptable work in the 
cause of human enlightenment, and the soul's 
redemption. The whole vast aura of the earth, 
the illimitable ether trembles and thrills with 
the majesty of the word. High above the 
thunder-roll of human discontent and awful 
pain, blazes the lightning of thought, and the 
undying aspiration of the soul. And thus shall 
we tell our story — thus record the history of the 
now oncoming race. Not in material emblems 
only, consecrated to the forces of nature; but 
in the spiritual records which tell of the free- 
ing of humanity from the tyranny of effete 
religions, and the upbuilding of a new compos- 
ite race, fear free, and worshipful only of 
recognized universal truth. 



EVOLUTION" OF THE SOUL 123 



ETHICAL LAW. 

Setting aside all our hereditary beliefs, all 
our theological teachings let us try to consider 
the true teachings of Jesus as differentiated 
from the instructions given by Moses for the 
guidance of the Jews. Moses never told his 
people to love and forgive their enemies. 
Jesus made a strong point of this, even bidding 
his disciples to forgive injuries to the seventieth 
time. Moses impressed upon his people the 
excellence of revenge, always demanding "an 
eye for an eye," a life for a life. Jesus said 
all that sort of compensation rested forever 
with God, that He alone, who saw and knew the 
hearts of men ? could deal justly with them. 
The old Jewish law stoned to death the immoral 
woman — not the man — no ! certainly not ! 
Jesus said to a flagrant woman brought before 
him by a rabble of men: "Let him that is 
without sin cast the first stone." What divine 
sarcasm, and how they are said to have slunk 
away under his perception of them ! 

How is it now with the Christian religion in 
the so-called Christian nations? Where on the 
face of the earth is there a community or a 
people that is governed and controlled by the 
real teachings of the Christ? 

All our jurisprudence is based upon the laws 
given to the Jews by their leader and lawgiver. 



124 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

We take the lives of those people who are guilty 
of breaking certain laws of ours based upon 
the laws of Moses, and while we do not stone 
the life out of those women — not men — whom 
we prove guilty of breaking the seventh com- 
mandment, we do build up against them walls 
of conventionality, and of uncharity harder 
than the rocks once used for the killing of their 
bodies. 

Consider this beautiful law now in operation 
in the state of New York. If a poor, starving, 
homeless, hopeless human being, maddened by 
the bitter woes of life, seeks surcease of pain by 
throwing off his own individual life, by commit- 
ting suicide, the law insists that such a one shall 
be not only forced back to a continuance of a 
horrible existence here, but that each and every 
one of such sinners shall be punished by im- 
prisonment and fine. If that isn't serving the 
devil, what in the name of common sense is it? 
Where are the good Samaritans among the pre- 
tended followers of the loving Christ? What 
sort of a reckoning will such lawmakers have 
to meet, and what penalties undergo under the 
applied judgment of the Great Teacher and 
exemplars? "Woe to him through whom 
offences come," he said, and again: "Because 
ye did not give aid and comfort to the least of 
these, I will not call you of my flock." Could 
anything be more brutally unmerciful than such 
a law as this in its dealings with the most help- 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 125 

less, forlorn, and seemingly Godforsaken of all 
earth's children — the voluntary suicide? 

How the demons mnst gloat over the lost 
souls who formed and enforced such a fiendish 
law! Why this everlasting "harking back" to 
Moses, while posing as followers of teachings 
utterly at variance with his ? Let us admit that 
we are Jews and stop persecuting them because 
they are not Christians, or let us try to know 
what Christ Jesus really meant us to under- 
stand by his ethics of love and good will to men. 

Many people have lost all their faith in the 
immortality of the soul, because Moses did not 
preach it. It is quite possible that even the 
worshipped Moses did not know everything 
that men may yet come to know about this, and 
anent a world of other things. Neither did the 
troglodytes, nor the cliff dwellers know of 
electricity or the X-ray! But Jesus knew of 
the life — the eternal, unquenchable life — of the 
soul beyond this mortal existence, and he knew 
and taught the way and the life that leads to 
that higher life. All through his teachings run 
this under-current of belief in the value of the 
individual soul, and instructions as to the 
highest and best way to evolve it from its lowest 
estate up to the Infinite. 

Fancy what a revolution would come to the 
whole so-called Christian world if the ethics of 
Jesus, so plainly set down in his legacy to the 
children of men, were understood and lived! 



126 INSIGHTS AND HEBESIES 

What wrong and injustice would be done away 
with, what works of mercy would be wrought ! 

HUMAN LIFE. 

From the earliest soul consciousness to this 
very hour the mystery of human life has been, 
and is the subject of greatest interest. What 
is the origin of man? What is he here for? 
What is the everlasting purpose of him? And 
what, what is his destiny, here or hereafter? 

The woeful story told in the Bible of the 
origin and the "Fall of man," entailing untold 
miseries and uncomprehended anguish upon 
the whole human race, has never been believed 
in by thinking minds. Especially all that 
"rot" about God's repenting Himself of having 
made man in his own image, and then setting 
Himself up in his only Son — a sacrifice to Him- 
self — for the sins of the folks He had just made 
and set agoing, and told to subdue and master 
the planet He had made for them to live on; 
but this yarn caught the fancy of infantile and 
puerile minds, and also of the designing priests 
and theologians who have never, to this day, 
tired of "baring the backs" of humanity to 
this "devil's rod," increasing, and multiplying 
the tortures of the minds of such as could be 
made to accept such stuff by fears which could 
never be comprehended or justified even in the 
minds of such children. 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 127 

Qur Heavenly Father has never set " metes 
and bounds" to the souls of his earth children; 
there is no hidden mystery that cannot be 
fathomed by them; there is no knowledge with- 
held from the earnest seeker after truth. But 
first of all, the mind must be clarified and set 
free from the blasphemous superstitions en- 
gendered by the crude beliefs taught by theolo- 
gians. The developed mind, and reason must 
arouse to rage and resistance in view of the 
wreck and ruin of untold millions of lives, the 
result of false teachings. 

ANIMAL LIKENESS. 

People have a way of saying of those they 
admire greatly: "She has the face of an 
angel," or "She is a perfect beauty," "Beauty 
beyond compare, ' ' et al, according to their ideas 
of what constitutes absolute beauty; but the 
human countenances that have in them no 
faintest suggestion of the kingdom below us are 
very rare. If one looks attentively at the faces 
of the crowd as it surges along the most at- 
tractive street, there may be seen on review 
surprising resemblances. A man looking like 
an elephant, another like a toad, bull dogs and 
wolves galore, beneficent faces of old people, 
calm and patient, resembling work-worn horses, 
always folk of both sexes who suggest sheep, — 
now and again a cantankerous billy goat. You 



128 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

may be sure that the vast numbers of reptiles 
are not left out of the human representation, 
and the birds, too. The " eagle eye," and the 
carniverous beak require no introduction to the 
menagerie, they belong there. But the felines 
have it, the cats, little and big, monopolize the 
show. Men regard a recognized resemblance 
to the king of beasts — the lion — a compliment 
to their natural powers and rightful rulership, 
while women have to put up with being con- 
sidered cats, and many of them prove by their 
cattish doings their resemblance to their animal 
ancestry. There are babies everywhere about. 
It is disheartening to peer into their tiny faces 
and see in so many of their eyes no "specula- 
tion," no suggestion of intelligence. They 
remind you of the eyes of a fish. 

Human beings have through them strains 
suggestive of the animal kingdom. It seems 
quite right to expect each one to act like the 
creature he resembles, when under the stress of 
violent emotion. 

NATUBAL SUPEBSTITION. 

At the creation of the race there was thrown 
around it such safeguards as should tend to its 
continuance. These were, of course, implanted 
in the crude mentality of undeveloped man. 
Underlying all the rest and the most important 
to its perpetuation was fear. The ignorant 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 129 

child has no fear of consequences attendant 
upon any action; experience teaches him to 
know what they are, and how to protect him- 
self from them. This was the first lesson of 
primitive man, and when, through the exercise 
of his inventive faculties, he had mastered his 
visible foes, the animal monsters surrounding 
him and threatening his life, and he found 
himself confronted by the action of terrible 
forces which he could not grasp or see, he, by 
analogy, endowed them with personality, and 
such attributes as he knew himself to be pos- 
sessed of, adding thereto powers and possibili- 
ties which were limited only by his own 
imagination. This was the very beginning of 
the working of the mental in him ? and while it 
was most grotesque and unreasoning, it yet 
drew a sharp line between the mere animal and 
the animal man, and his whole life being spent 
in conflict with his foes, he naturally carried 
forward his growing perceptions of the exist- 
ence of supernatural powers which were in- 
fluencing his life upon the same basis, i. e., of 
an unending warfare, wherein he must always 
be the one attacked and vanquished. Fear of 
the animal world developed into a shivering 
terror of the invisible, and so deep and lasting 
was this first impression of the spiritual world 
upon his crude faculties, that it was made an 
universal heredity among all races and peoples. 
It exists everywhere today, even among those 



130 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

who profess to be living in the light of a higher 
revelation of God's purpose in the life of man. 

ADAPTIVENESS OF MAN. 

The most surprising and extraordinary- 
quality of mind manifested by man is his ready 
power of adaptation to whatever may become 
a part of his earthly experiences. It, alone, 
assures his continual progress upon all lines of 
growth connected not only with his earthly but 
also his immortal career. Great inventions, 
unexpected discoveries, and astounding revela- 
tions may stagger him for a moment; but the 
facility with which he finally absorbs all the 
hitherto unknown outworkings of science and 
natural law, and assimilates them to his inner 
sense of the fitness of things, changing all his 
relationship to his material life, and forcing 
himself to a readjustment not only of his mental 
perceptions, but also of his external existence 
gives proof sufficient of his being not only 
favored of the gods, but also of his near kin- 
ship with them. The marvels of mechanics, the 
divinely beautiful representations of art, and 
the exalted inspirations of literature were 
never so sought after, or so appreciated by 
large portions of the race as at the present 
time., The peasant's cot today is made com- 
fortable and beautified by accessories which 
within our historical knowledge could not be 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 131 

commanded by kings and princes possessed of 
great riches. 

The spiritual origin of the splendid architect- 
ure of the great " white city" and later of the 
southern expositions is perfectly apparent to 
the eye of the mystic and the seer, and these 
vast, concentrated exhibits of the world's work 
are object lessons of which the influence can 
never be outlived even by the careless and unob- 
serving. Today the great leaders of men, led 
by inspiring thoughts which would have 
appalled their forefathers, perfect schemes for 
overcoming the obstacles inhering in the vast 
forces of nature, and harness them into sub- 
servience to the growing needs of the race. 

What devil-worshippers those old chaps 
were ! To him they ascribed all power over 
things animate and inanimate, and the effront- 
ery of the man who should have even mentioned 
the possibility of talking over a wire, thousands 
of miles, or of utilizing the forces of Niagara, 
or of hundreds of inventions now in use in the 
most commonplace surroundings would have 
been met with condign punishment. Our in- 
ventors would be in dungeons instead of their 
comfortable laboratories, and our great en- 
gineers would long ago have lost their heads. 
What a time we have had getting the devil out 
of our mechanical life! Now he can only rule 
in the immaterial world, in the crude imagina- 
tions of- the ignorant and superstitious. 



132 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 



DEVIL WOESHIP. 

The Infinite Mind is in all things, everywhere 
what we are not. Where we are full of im- 
patience, He is calm and unmoved; wherein we 
grope blindly, He, seeing the end from the 
beginning, is well content with his own handi- 
work, and with the final outcome of the souls 
of his earthly children. Many of the imperfec- 
tions and individual shortcomings of people are 
laid aside in the dark crucible of physical death 
and the grave. Such of these tendencies as are 
carried over into the next plane of being, per- 
sisting in the spirit, are there dealt with as 
disease or ignorance, the results of malforma- 
tion or bad environment. God is love, not hate, 
and "rejoiceth not in the death of the wicked," 
nor in the punishment of the wrongly educated ; 
for a large portion of the sin and seeming 
iniquity of humanity is the result of heredity 
and of a misunderstanding of the laws of God 
expressed through nature. Undoubtedly there 
have been good men and true among those who 
sought to interpret God's law aright and 
formulate a code for the guidance and discipline 
of humanity in accordance with justice and 
equity. But their premises were all wrong. 
They took for their foundation the old Jewish 
history wherein the God of the Hebrews was 
always represented as a jealous being, rejoicing 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 133 

in revenge and rapine, and in all that the en- 
lightened world can conceive of as characteriz- 
ing a devil. So the modern world has been 
committed to a devil worship. Nowhere is the 
ethical teaching of Jesus recognized in our 
laws. It is the old Hebraic attitude toward life 
and God. 

FANATICISM. 

Physical death is the fulfilling of a natural 
law everywhere prevailing ; a change, which the 
mutability of all material creations renders nec- 
essary, and salutary, and, when received with- 
out the prejudices engendered by education, 
pleasing. Eeligion has nothing to do with it, and 
more than that it ought to influence every act 
of life. No more has religion anything to do 
with the intercourse of disembodied spirits with 
those in the form. That also is wholly con- 
trolled by laws inherent in the nature of things, 
and will, when the ridiculous hue and cry raised 
by sensualistic minds has somewhat abated, 
resolve itself into a fixed fact having no more 
direct bearing upon human affairs than any 
other form of social intercourse. It has taught 
no new code of morals ; it has not overthrown, 
so much as it has revealed the true state of 
things. It has revived the spiritual teachings 
of him by whom the world — called from him 



134 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

Christian — professes to be guided and con- 
trolled. 

Fanaticism is the law of some minds, and it 
will display itself in whatever arena they are 
engaged. In politics the man they vote for is 
almost a god. In mechanics, they have invented 
a machine which shall ensure "perpetual 
motion;" in chemistry, the elixir of life, or a 
cure for all the ills of human life; in morals, 
the kingdom of heaven is speedily coming 
through the intervention of their dead friends. 

The truest religion is that which adheres 
most faithfully to nature's laws; for strive we 
ever so hard, we must return to them. They 
are God's will made manifest, and the mind 
most free from prejudice engendered by false 
education is the one which secures to itself the 
most harmony, making possible that removal of 
"mountains" so often quoted — meaning the 
inevitable obstacles of spiritual life. 

Christ said: "The kingdom of heaven is 
within you" and he might have added that of 
hell also. Here is the beginning, if not the end- 
ing of all growth and reform. There seems to 
be a universal tendency or wish to escape from 
one's self, and most so-called reforms begin at 
the surface — the ultimate — rather than at the 
centre. This should be an education to chil- 
dren, teaching them that their temptations are 
to be dreaded only as they are responded to by 
something within, and that loses all power with 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 135 

them as they gain self-knowledge and self- 
control. 

TRUTH. 

The demand for a knowledge of the truth, 
God's truth, is as old as the world, the world 
of intellect and knowledge, the world we know 
about, and of which we have a more of less true 
history. This cry of earnest and thoughtful 
men and women for truth, "nothing but the 
truth" has rung adown the ages from the pagan, 
and the nature worshipper through all the 
countless phases of belief to our modern pre- 
sentations of inspired faith. Everyone who 
dares to think must realize how this longing of 
humanity has been met and exploited in times 
past by ignorant and self-seeking people, and 
suffering humanity has been imposed upon by 
superstitious and false teachings which have 
left it in sorrowful dissatisfaction, or lost in 
the mazes of doubt and unbelief. 

The fool hath said in his heart "there is no 
God." Life is too short and too full of interest 
in other directions for us to turn aside to combat 
fools of any sort. If we admit into our inner 
consciousness the absolute recognition of the 
existence of a supremely loving and wise God 
whose attributes are more marvelously great 
and grand than it can ever enter into the heart 
of man, or the mind of the highest archangel 



136 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

to conceive, we shall have taken the first step 
toward so positing ourselves toward him, as we 
perceive him embodied in his works, as to begin 
to see some faint indications of the divine pur- 
pose concerning the souls of men created in his 
image. All that we know of his laws and his 
intentions toward us, as indicated by our experi- 
ences here and now, embodied as we are in 
matter, supplies the whole of the data from 
which we infer truth, the truth as it is in Grod. 

We find, first of all, that we are set here a 
homogenous race, for as the means of com- 
munication between widely separated branches 
of the family become established and easy, our 
horizons expand, racial prejudice and antag- 
onisms vanish, new interests and fresh sym- 
pathies arise, and we are thus brought to 
recognize the fact of our common origin. 

What a dull and deadly uninteresting place 
this planet would be without the differentiation 
of the races ! What if the whole united world 
were Irish or German, Russian, or even loudly 
pervading, assumptive American! What an 
awful element of boredom would be added to our 
existence ; and yet there are people so blind to 
this most wonderful expression of God's Provi- 
dence, that they limit their sympathetic regards 
to a chosen few, and virtually cast all other 
peoples into outer darkness. This applies 
especially to religious prejudices and beliefs. 
Let 's see about this : your antecedents were, so 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 137 

far as you know, Scotch and English, but by 
some providential intervention you are now 
American. You are expected to scorn and 
despise all other clans and races, and to condone 
all the faults and crimes of these which have 
been so honored by you, and this is called 
patriotism, and makes you feel virtuous and 
popular, and it is necessary and right — polit- 
ically considered — but not from the standpoint 
of the occult, the spiritual side of existence. 
There is a wise intention and purpose in the 
blending of the races in their intermarriages, 
it is for the breaking down of prejudices as old 
as the race itself, that have ever kept the peo- 
ples of the earth apart. 

There is but one law of evolution, and that 
which holds for the individual epitomizes that 
of a nation, or a world. So as we see people at 
a certain stage of their unf oidment of individ- 
uality exhibit an extreme egotism, amounting 
almost to an insanity, by isolating them, by 
confining them to the radius of their own men- 
tality, so it is with the different tribes and races 
and nations of the world. They are set apart 
to grow their own peculiar traits of character, 
possible only to their prescribed environment, 
that they may thus push forward their own 
special gifts and endowments to their own 
ultimates. This is but a phase of their evolu- 
tionary process, a class preparation looking 
toward a wider experience, wherein it shall 



138 



INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 



come to be seen that all the world is akin. 
Referring again to the unit man. The shib- 
boleth of the just present past time has been 
individualism which, rightly understood, means 
simply that the soul of man has progressed to 
a point where occult forces can lay hold on the 
crude being and shape it into a worthy likeness 
of its divine Maker, and it must there stand 
alone, until it feels its at-one-ment with the 
Divine and sees and acknowledges the higher 
law and purpose of its being, and furthermore 
recognizes why it has been called into existence. 
Truth is like certain chemicals. It can only 
be retained by the mind wherein it finds an 
adapted affinity, and then it has in each a dis- 
tinctly individual expression according to the 
mental and moral status of that mind. But 
laws and principles are stationary and un- 
changeable; it is our own personal knowledge* 
which varies and changes with our growth. We 
may ignore and denounce certain phases of 
phenomena, but the phenomena work on just 
the same, unaffected by our beliefs or disbeliefs. 
The loss is ours if we willfully close our eyes 
and ears against the enlightening message 
which it would bring to us in passing our way. 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 139 



CHEISTS. 

Confucius, the moralist, Buddha, the intel- 
lectualist, Jesus, the loving. Why reject the 
teachings of any one of this trinity of inspired 
and inspiring ones? All are of God, light 
bringers to a darkened world. 

HEBO WOKSHIP. 

All along the individual life, the soul's de- 
velopment through matter, are strewn experi- 
ences which mark the dawning force which is 
finally to culminate in its marked individuality, 
and separation from the mass of organized, 
created beings. These experiences are the rare 
awakenings of the soul to the realization and 
use of its own native powers which flow from 
its divine paternity and origin, and which con- 
stitute its birthright and ultimate inheritance. 
At times, the gifts and powers of certain beings 
burst into bloom and fruition when least 
expected, and cast a radiance and a halo around 
the personality, which mark and award it a 
place among its fellow men, altogether superior 
to the general trend and outworkings of the 
recognized character. Around such illuminated 
points of high expression of the soul's possibili- 
ties gather other personalities and, by the action 
of a natural law, crystalize about the central 



140 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

magnet of the inspired, and the inspiring 
thought or action, and thus is leadership 
created. Rarely does the entire life outwork 
itself upon lines which harmoniously express 
the inspiration which begot the godlike union 
of the human with the divine, and thus through 
the natural falling away from the ideal, those 
who seek the higher life through imitation or 
emulation of the model so set up are finally 
forced to put aside their hero worship and seek 
their own individual growth on the lines upon 
which they can lawfully unfold. 

The varying moods, and idiosyncrasies of the 
hero or the saint turn away their followers to 
the contemplation and study of those great 
moral principles which rule the world and con- 
trol the universe. 

On the physical plane great strides are being 
made. The suppleness of one, the power of 
balance of another, the feats of the acrobat, the 
will of the juggler which commands the action, 
and the seeming suspension of natural law; all 
these expressions are ever increasing and vary- 
ing through the industry and the ingenuity of 
man, and point to the possibilities of the hitherto 
undreamed of physical perfection of develop- 
ment, and grand unfolding of unknown powers. 
Man must master the earth by controlling the 
laws of the material world. This is the founda- 
tion of all things, and upon it shall be built all 
that the soul must have for its unfoldment, 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 141 

within the aura and the radius of this external 
plane. 



If there can be one thing more pitiful than 
all others it is to see little human bugs and 
reptiles mount their egotistical stilts and 
declare the non-existence of the Creator. 

If the blatant critics would only give over 
blowing their individual horns, and remark for 
a little the value of quiet introspection, many 
mysteries would reveal themselves and much 
good would be realized. 

KEASON. 

Human reason is the outgrowth of the intui- 
tion. In its final analysis, it is the comprehen- 
sion by the soul of the reality of truth and of 
its just relationships and values. It is the 
power of discriminating and deciding between 
the perception of the intuition and the testi- 
mony of facts gathered by observation and 
experience. The intuition of man is of the will, 
that of woman is of the affections; thus it is 
more spiritual than man's. Just as the doctors 
have prospected and laid out and defined the 
functions of the physical body, so are the 
psychologists and the mental scientists seeking 
a way and method by which the attributes of 
the real being may be divided off into sections 
and labelled accordingly. The fact is, the in- 



iiiikiiu; 



142 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

dividual soul is all the time struggling to reach 
its own at-one-ment with itself. When it comes 
under the tuition and discipline of the gods, 
and begins to perceive their methods, it can 
understand the whys and wherefores of the 
intentions of life's experiences. They are to 
consolidate and make practical vagrant emo- 
tions and tendencies, and lop off and scorch out 
the idiosyncrasies of heredity and custom, and 
rouse the soul to a knowledge of its need of 
harmony with divine law. Into the real soul 
depths can no divulging line and plummet 
reach. This domain belongs to its Creator 
alone. It is only as the tests of living and 
doing manifest hidden motives and meanings 
that we catch glimpses of the ego that abides 
within and through this life, submerged as it is 
in the flesh. We can know but little of what is 
now, or of what yet shall be, when the whole- 
ness of the individual is established. 

SYMPATHY. 

Be not beguiled by pity masquerading in the 
guise of sympathy. Real sympathy comes only 
through an understanding of conditions as the 
result of the same, or of exactly similar experi- 
ences. But though experiences differ in details, 
according to the organizations and idiosyncra- 
sies of individuals, the results in awakening the 
mind to a realization of truth, and final evolu- 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 143 

tion and growth of the soul are enough alike to 
foster a real sympathy, and mutual understand- 
ing. Souls thus linked together are truly 
friends and comrades. 

NEW BELIGIONS. 

There is a great demand among the people of 
this, and probably of every past age, for some- 
thing new in the revelations of religious thought 
and knowledge. "When it has not been forth- 
coming according to the desires of aspiring 
worshippers, the imaginations of would-be 
teachers and leaders have set to work to devise 
new schemes for the beguiling of their fellow 
mortals that should hypnotize them, and hold 
their allegiance to some new revelation of 
religion, or so-called science. The following 
that some of the isms, and newly-hatched cults 
are getting together is simply amazing. They 
seem to reach out and pervade the world, and 
they are not confined to any particular grade or 
class of people. The l ' Zionists, ' ' the ' ' Advent- 
ists, ' ' the ' ' Perfectionists, ' ' the ' ' Holy Boilers, ' ? 
the "Christian Scientists," the " Spiritualists, " 
and unnumbered other forms of belief leave a 
wide margin for all sorts and kinds of people 
of peculiar idiosyncrasies. So much has been 
promised, and so little realized in the way of 
comfort and satisfaction that wails of doubt, 
and sorrow are undiminished. Every bit of 



»HHI- 



144 INSIGHTS AND HEEESIES 

this "groundswell" of seeking, tortured souls 
is just the reaction from slavish, blasphemous, 
orthodox religion. 

From the perceptions of the primitive man 
to the understandings of the unfolded brains of 
the thinking, reasoning people of today is 
indeed a "far cry," and the queer vagaries, and 
the impossible goings on of the reputed gods, 
in partnership with Nature, that were once 
received with awe and profound belief, have 
now nearly lost their hold upon the credulity 
of modern humanity. 

As man has unfolded and his perceptions 
have enlarged, his fears of the wrath of God, 
and of his possible interference with man's 
schemes and purposes have given way to man's 
own will, and to his determination to succeed 
in proving himself master of nature's forces, 
and of the whole planet. He has created the 
"New Earth" of material comfort and satisfac- 
tion that has been so long foretold; while from 
the heavens countless multitudes of awakened, 
arisen souls throng all the ways of life, pro- 
claiming the truth of the absolute present exist- 
ence of a "New Heaven" also. This is not a 
perfect time, by any means, even with all this 
manifestation of progressive power. Perfec- 
tion in anything, in all things, is a matter of 
growth, of evolution, and the whole world is 
swinging along in the pathway of progress 
toward that goal, the knowledge of spiritual 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 145 

law which is God, as fast as time can move. 
But we are actually living in the enjoyment of 
the fulfillment of a profound prophecy, with but 
little thought or realization of all it means or 
portends. 

THE GEOWTH PEOCESSES OF THE 
HUMAN SOUL. 

It is pitiful to think of all the woe and sorrow 
that have been shed abroad in the hearts of 
men and women, and even of little children, by 
the teachings of ignorant and designing beings 
anent Death. Fortunately, all our modern cults 
are emphasizing the fact that it is the fear of 
death that is the "last enemy" of humanity 
that is to be put down and shorn of its terror. 
Physical death is only a step in our evolution. 
It cannot be otherwise than a progressive 
motion of the spirit. It recalls the spirit from 
the make-believe, and misunderstandings of its 
earthly environments, and experiences, and 
shows up the real and true status of life. Vast 
numbers of human beings, passing out of the 
chrysalis of the fleshly embodiment leave with 
the body sins for which they have been con- 
demned, and idiosyncrasies for which they are 
not accountable : there are, too, packs of people 
who have been so bamboozled by orthodox 
teachings, so set up in their egotism, that they 
die believing in their superior claim to recog- 



146 INSIGHTS AND HEKESIES 

nition by the gods, but who find themselves 
elected to a long sit down in purgatory, or 
devachan — or whatever the place is — while they 
get acquainted with themselves as they really 
are. The most deplorable state is that of the 
souls who cannot rise from the earth conditions 
with which they are loaded down. They fill the 
atmosphere ; they walk the earth dismayed and 
helpless; their whilom friends and beloved ones 
will have none of them. Even if one such is 
fortunate enough to find a medium through 
whom he can communicate, he gets little or no 
recognition or welcome, unless he can abso- 
lutely conform to the wishes of the purblind 
folk, who, knowing nothing of spiritual law, try 
to insist upon making conditions, and getting 
tests which are so outside of the law that even 
the Creator could not meet their demands. For 
those who have no aspiration toward the spirit- 
ual life, the only way is to plunge back into 
matter through another incarnation in the 
flesh. There are no new souls created and 
relegated to this planet. Their number is 
fixed. They pass and pass, and come again; 
good, bad and indifferent all come under the 
same, the only law of evolution. The gates of 
life are crowded with such as these who, weary 
of prowling to no purpose, seek re-embodiment 
on this plane of existence. The process through 
which they thus pass is of itself one of refining 
and of readjusting to changed conditions, which 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 147 

means growth for the soul; for throughout the 
universe, the Great Law, the law which holds 
all things in equilibrium, is the law of progress, 
evolution, unf oldment. 

It must be remembered always that back of 
all the recognized greetings, and the assurances 
of the continued, conscious life of our spirit 
friends, back of all the lesser gods, who were 
human beings, like unto ourselves, back of all 
the inspired teachings of all the seers and 
prophets is God, "our Heavenly Father," in 
whom we live and have our being. 

Through his appointed teachers is vouch- 
safed to his earthly children a knowledge of 
his love and wisdom. It is boundless and free 
for all, and there are no "chosen people." He 
is the source, the fountain head from which 
flows all life, and all sustaining power. The 
heavens declare the glory of God — the Creator ; 
and the arisen souls of men proclaim his won- 
drous and unfailing interest in all his created 
beings. 

NECESSITY FOE PHENOMENA. 

Some people are born so spiritual-minded 
that the proper adjustment of the several func- 
tions pertaining to the moral or religious 
nature stand clearly defined. Their immortal- 
ity is never doubted, their faith in the unseen 
never obscured by clouds of passion, or dimmed 



- 



148 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

by pressure of material necessities. These are 
the beacon lights in the world's progress. 
These are the mariners to whom has been given 
a sure guide and compass. The others are 
those who have little or no perception beyond 
what is seen to befall animal life, and their 
growth into a finer possibility must be slow 
and tedious. It is in fact necessary that many 
should "rise from the dead" and jam tables and 
chairs and things around their apartments, ere 
they can fancy the possibility of any existence 
separate from this material life. 

The most abominable of all egotisms is that 
which forever studies to limit the possibilities 
of the Creator, to announce firmly that there is 
no further consciousness, and no need for 
human faculties after this life is ended. The 
most dignified attitude would be to give him 
the benefit of the doubt, to admit that He has 
the power to continue, and remould, and read- 
just through all time and all eternity. But 
this is not a class of subjects which can be 
settled by logic. It is based upon a conviction 
of the inner soul, and the most that anyone 
can do is to place himself as nearly as possible 
in harmony with some one law, and this will 
form a center around which a perception of 
more shall come, and revolve around it grandly 
and in perfect time, thus completing the round- 
ing out — the fullness — of the character of the 
individual man or woman. 



EVOLUTION" OF THE SOUL 149 



WILL. 

Will, human will, is the result of concrete 
perceptions of the conscious mind. Its develop- 
ment depends upon the experiences of the in- 
dividual soul, and its expression upon the 
environment, the education, and spiritual dis- 
cipline of the individual. Having its founda- 
tion in the functions necessary to the sustain- 
ment of the mortal life of man, it naturally 
overrides all considerations outside of the 
objects of its own pursuit. It is the quality 
par excellence, the power of the gods, but only 
as it comes to relinquish all its selfish deter- 
minations, and yield obedience to the all-per- 
vading Higher Will, the will of God, in whom 
all life has its source and continuance of being 
can it march along the royal highway that leads 
to perfection. This must be so eternally; for 
there can be no division of purpose or of 
interest in the divine Mind. 



All religions based upon or derived from 
sorceries obstruct the progress of the race, and 
will be, in the fullness of time, disintegrated 
and readjusted to meet the growing demands 
of humanity. 



mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmimmimmmimmm 






150 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 



CHANGE OF ATOMS. 

There is nothing so great that it cannot be 
undermined and destroyed. There is nothing 
so established and sanctioned by age-long, 
consecrated usage that shall not finally be 
swept along into oblivion and utterly forgotten. 

There is no combination of material atoms — 
no mechanism, however strong and useful — 
that shall not dissolve and be rearranged, and 
take on ever higher forms of expression. This 
is, and has always been the unfailing law of 
progression, of the outworking of the ascend- 
ing series. It involves all circumstances, and 
all earthly experiences. Happy are those who 
take Paul's advice, who can equip themselves 
with the armor of faith, which begets knowl- 
edge, and prepare to " fight the battle of life" 
with courage and fortitude. 

OUR LIMITATIONS. 

Much of our successful conduct of life 
depends upon our recognition of our limita- 
tions, and largely our limitations depend upon 
the will. The test lies in the power to discrimi- 
nate between what one owes to one's self, and 
the duties and obligations imposed by responsi- 
bilities inherited or assumed. Temperaments 
are so variable, no two human beings alike. 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 151 

Much, too, depends upon the power and habit of 
observation. 

FINAL EACE EXPERIENCE. 

The fear of death — shared in by all created 
beings — is nature's safeguard against a uni- 
versal stampede from this life by physical 
death, when the miseries of existence on this 
earthly plane become too dreadful to be borne, 
when the tortures of the soul, in the tortured 
body drives out all reason, and all philosophy^ 
and the consciousness senses only the demand 
for surcease of agony. Probably most people 
have experienced, for a moment, in a time of 
terrible crisis, a thought, if not an impulse, to 
seek thus to end all suffering by flinging off the 
bonds of life here, and thus pass out into — 
what? Simply life in a changed environment, 
with exactly the same responsibilities and soul 
needs, and the same causes of their miseries, 
and unsatisfied desires still existing in their 
minds. 

Life here is just one link in the endless, 
unbreakable chain of existence. It is all one, 
here, hereafter, anywhere. Caught in the web 
of life, there is no escape from its demands 
upon the individual soul. Somewhere along 
the way it has to decide its own fate, upward 
and onward, or downward into the purlieus of 
the crude beginnings of things. It is free to 



152 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

make its choice. It can pursue the hard and 
toilsome path of earning its right to eternal 
happiness, or it can flop around through all the 
hells of life unrelated to God, and resistant to 
Christ. 

One by one all human beings must obey the 
call to march over into the border land, into 
nature's infinite invisible realm; they cannot 
help themselves; no one can; on. they go, an 
endless caravan, to the land of revelations, the 
place of reviews where the utterly selfish are 
fetched up with a " round turn" and made to 
realize that a real Godliness is the only thing 
that can pass muster, that mere beliefs do not 
count, and only character tells. How swiftly, 
how inevitably their places are filled ! Nothing 
stops; prince or peasant, it is all one; the will 
of the gods, the guardians of this planet, is 
being fulfilled. 

RELIGIOUS PERFORMANCES. 

"It is to laugh" to "see the heathen rage 
and devise a vain thing." No hierarchy of 
earth, no multitudinous howl of ignorance and 
stupidity that "having eyes that see not; and 
having ears that hear not ' ' can block the wheels 
of progress. It has worked in the past, "quite 
some," routing out tortured souls and bodies 
by the millions, sending them flying off from 
this planet which was, and is their real home, 



EVOLUTION" OF THE SOUL 153 

turning rack and screw, and setting baleful fires 
on tender flesh, threatening further eternal hell 
fires; all for what? Why, to prove that 
* ' tweedle dee, ' ' is greater than i ' tweedle dum, ' ' 
and this is the record of religion at the hands 
of the theologians and the priests ! This is the 
story of accepted orthodox religion. Why, 
then, have a religion? Why not try the 
altruism taught by the great Master in a system 
of ethics that can never be superseded by one 
higher and more truth-inspiring, better adapted 
to the perfect unf oldment of the human race ? 

No more of these awful persecutions, and 
massacres, and killings for the " glory of God;" 
for the amusement of devils, really! Practical 
common sense, and reason will surely be, in 
time, the salvation of this world. 

OF TEACHERS. 

The wisest teacher is the one who shows the 
gradual processes of unfoldment and growth in 
the mind and body, and in all the outworkings 
of the material world. He who breaks down 
arbitrary distinctions in every realm of life 
does the most toward liberating and enlighten- 
ing the world. We are from infancy so accus- 
tomed to petty distinctions which have origi- 
nated in ignorance, and from long use have been 
formulated into laws, fixed and binding, that 
were some person clear-sighted enough to the 



iVil^rVYVTlf lilBHM 



mmm 



154 INSIGHTS AND HEKESIES 

truth to show us our invisible bonds, and how 
to sever them with the scalpel of common sense, 
and reason, we would be amazed at our great 
freedom, and astonished to see the light com- 
ing through thousands of loopholes and win- 
dows of the mind which are now closed by an 
accumulation of dust and cobwebs of the petty 
superstitions of ages. 



Millions of beings are born so starved that 
no after nourishing can make up for it. 

WISE USE OF MONEY. 

The money that has been spent in building 
up blasphemous theologies would have rid the 
whole world of poverty, and ignorance, if it 
had been beneficently employed with the kind 
intention of doing the peoples of the earth good, 
in every way, instead of trying to fix upon them 
damnation now, and also arrange for it in their 
life hereafter. 

Here and there, scattered along the way, are 
souls who have escaped the " drag-net" of 
theology, but there are at this present moment 
great spirits that, even after having passed 
through death's dark crucible, are haunted by 
damning fears of bad results possible from too 
much freedom. The trail of the serpent is felt 
by them still. 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 155 



GENIUS. 

Genius means simply a high and true 
sympathy with inanimate and human nature, 
and the power to voice their various moods and 
tenses. 

Paradoxes seem to run riot in all occult things. 
Extremes in all departments are rare. There 
are a far greater number of indifferently good 
and indifferently bad people than of the super- 
latively good or bad. So Nature everywhere 
keeps the equilibrium, and the eternal processes 
of evolution go on, and ever onward toward 
perfection. 

All the pains of this human life come in con- 
sequence of the resistance of the souls of men 
to the law of progress which is always, and 
everywhere, laying hold of them to force them 
from the sod up to God. They squirm, and 
wriggle, and howl, and make no end of fuss, 
because the Lord calls upon them to awake 
from their animalism, and sloth, and arise, and 
seek the kingdom. 



"He knoweth our frame," no more comfort- 
ing, or encouraging words than these have ever 
been spoken. "He," the great soul-Father, 
knoweth us as we are. He knows how to 
inspire with hope, and courage the most sor- 
rowing and lost. The felon in his cell, the out- 



!j;mir 



156 INSIGHTS AND HEEESIES 

cast from all that men call good, are, with those 
of superior spiritual attainments, subjects of 
this beneficence. Nearly every soul feels, at 
some period of existence, its subtle relationship 
to a something, a power outside of its material 
life and surroundings. The experiences of this 
life are calculated to strengthen and perfect 
that relationship. Jesus Christ is credited with 
saying, "Be ye lifted up even as I am lifted 
up." That is, in spirit, to a perception of the 
relationship of your souls to the great "Over 
soul." 

Be ye, then, patient with yourselves, and with 
each other. Be sure that you are being taught, 
"lifted up" to a perception and knowledge of 
these things, as fast as it is lawful for you to be. 

In God's good time ye shall blossom and bear 
a goodly fruitage. 

"THOUGHTS ARE THINGS." 

But thoughts, as potent entities, must pass 
from the formative, nebulous condition into a 
crystallized state by, and through some form of 
externalization of language, spoken or written. 

Thoughts must be created — born — through 
the absolute form-creation of the human brain, 
in order to secure to them potentiality, and 
immortality. 

The status of the individual brain, decides 
its products, the character of its brain children. 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 157 

Thoughts that are not caught, clung to, and 
crystallized, through the action of the external 
brain can have no place in the external life of 
this world, although they do have their power 
and influence in the incorporate, silent, ever- 
working world of cause. 



The mind digs deep to bring forth the real. 

The soul dreads the edicts of its ignorant 
prototypes. The ego comes forward with its 
battle-axe, and the spirit rejoices and exults. 
Body, Soul, and Spirit; Nature's trinity. 



As spirit per se, has no entity, and only 
evolves individuality through its relationship 
with matter, and has no other conscious expres- 
sion, the so-long-talked-of "fall of man" was 
not a fall downward, but a process upward, 
necessary to his being, to his existence as man. 

UNFOLDMENT. 

The persistence of the human soul after 
physical death proves only that it is a candidate 
for immortality. The race is just begun. The 
path that leads onward to the eternal heights 
is so long, so beset with difficulties, with pains 
and penalties, losses and crosses, and all the 
paraphernalia of evolution and growth that the 
stoutest heart, the strongest will would fail to 
respond to the call to "come up higher," were 



■ 



158 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

one to at once become aware of what inevitably 
lay before him. When any individual soul has 
dwelt long enough in the spirit realm to begin 
to feel the unrest of the law of eternal progress, 
he senses the law of reincarnation, and his 
earthly home draws him by attraction. He is 
prof erred the cup of "renunciation," and 
forgetfulness, and is shown the way to his next 
embodiment. 

INVENTIONS. 

The inspired thinker sends out a thought to 
the world, it is taken up and passed through 
other brains, it becomes distorted or is recog- 
nized by them in its integrity according to the 
caliber of mind, or the idiosyncrasies of the 
one representing it. A thought or idea, once 
given to the world, becomes common property. 
It is not possible to put on mortgages or limit 
the use that may be made of it, or how it may 
be made to bring in returns to commercially- 
inspired minds. A woman devised a style of 
dress which she wore for her comfort at her 
own convenience. Another woman gave exactly 
the same pattern and details to the public, and 
is now living in elegance on the income derived 
from another. A man — a worker — invents an 
improvement, or a better method of doing 
things. The firm adopts and makes money out 
of it, and its originator is forgotten. There 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 15& 

are, however, clever people who know how to 
protect their inspirations, and get the benefit 
themselves. The greatest disappointment 
comes to the originator when the thought is 
intended to indicate and outline action. So 
few people can achieve the same point of view, 
so few can be depended upon for united, har- 
monious action that the best organizing power 
is at times fetched up with a ' ' round turn, ' ' and 
the progress of the good work intended becomes 
greatly impeded, or virtually lost. 

DIVINE HEALING. 

There are today many cults professing to 
have healing powers; but whether they are 
named "Christian," or "Mental," or "Spirit- 
ual," or "Divine Science," or whether the 
place of healing be in some shrine sacred to an 
accredited saint, or only in the presence of the 
patient receiving the benediction; they all 
operate under the same law ; there is no other. 

Jesus was the great transmitter to humanity 
of a knowledge of the power of divine healing; 
he never specialized. He never said: "I have 
cured your liver complaint, or your lungs are 
healed," etc., according to the ailment of the 
person seeking his aid. He only told them: 
"Thy [own] faith hath made thee whole." It 
was spoken of God long ago: "He healeth all 
our infirmities." The quality and the amount 



■ 



160 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

of personal magnetism possessed by the healer 
— the transmitter of the divine healing — does 
make a vast difference in the results of such 
efforts. The "Nazarene" was devoid of 
egotism, and selfishness, and his desire to heal 
and bless humanity was with him an over- 
whelming passion. 

That Jesus knew the value of right physical 
habits is evidenced by the way he had of 
admonishing his patients to "go and sin no 
more," that is, stop breaking nature's hygienic 
laws. He had all along told them that right 
thinking was necessary to right doing. 



The transcendentalism of one age, shorn of 
the peculiar shading given to it by the individ- 
uality of the mind through which it first mani- 
fests itself, becomes the hard "common sense" 
of the next. 



What is Truth? Truth is God. God is 
Truth. Nothing in the universe could exist for 
one instant unless it had in it some faint intui- 
tion of truth, and it is this that we are here to 
discover. 

SURPLUS. 

Human beings slaughtered on battle fields, or 
carried off by pestilence and famine by thou- 
sands, or perishing by accidents by sea or by 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 161 

land by hundreds, are individually dear and 
useful, and are mourned; but in the great 
aggregate of moving life on this planet, they 
count as surplus. 

ANALYSIS OF THE "LOED'S PRAYER." 

How shall we pray? To whom shall we 
pray? Shall we pray at all? These are 
unsettled questions in the minds of many good 
persons who are striving to perceive the highest 
truth and to be guided thereby. The tests that 
have been applied to the usefulness of prayer 
by a large class of religious people have been, 
for ages, purely materialistic. The Lord has 
been importuned for the bestowal of personal 
favors, from the manufacturing of the right 
kind of weather to the slaying of enemies, and 
from the righteous putting down of infidels, to 
the spending of dollars with which to build high 
steeples. Then, too, God has had the benefit 
of the very best advice concerning the way He 
ought to deal with the heathen, how He should 
treat sinners of every sort, so as to show him- 
self equal to managing his fractious subjects, 
and, finally, how to carry things along generally 
after such a fashion as should win and hold the 
respect of his earthly advisers. 

This utter misunderstanding of the true 
function of prayer has caused many earnest 
souls to sorrow over lost faith in what should 



MfliJuiiLiuuiuRffifimffimfflfrffli 



(i id i 



162 INSIGHTS AND HEBESIES 

have been to them a source of strength and 
uplifting. Jesus said: "Ask, and ye shall 
receive," and as all his teachings referred to 
things of the spirit, he must have meant to 
indicate to his followers that whatever was 
sought for in the line of true spiritual enlighten- 
ment would surely be given. No one prays for 
houses and lands, for gold and other forms of 
material wealth, "for Jesus Christ's sake. 
Amen. ? ' 

All through the teachings of Jesus run the 
mention of his and our Heavenly Parent, ' ' Our 
Father," and since much of our knowledge of 
spiritual things comes through our perception 
of the law of correspondences, we naturally feel 
and believe that we have not only a Father but 
also a Mother in heaven. The recognition of 
the mother element — the Divine Mother — has 
always been a most potent factor in the power 
of the Eoman Catholic Church to retain the 
unchanging devotion of its faithful adherents. 

The reaction from a bigoted belief in, and a 
blind reliance upon a jealous and tyrannical 
Overseer sitting in state to judge and condemn 
to everlasting torment all but a few of earth's 
children — a terror-inspiring God — has natural- 
ly turned the minds of many from recognition 
of any sort of relationship between humanity 
and a superior, divine and beneficent Power. 
The atheist glories in his disbelief, and calls 
exultingly upon those whose faith has become 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 163 

the stepping-stone to knowledge for proofs that 
he is not right in assuming to occupy the 
superior attitude of mind. Suppose for a 
moment, that all the world were brought to 
coincide with him. How would it benefit the 
race to prove it to be wholly orphaned — utterly 
left out of all consideration for its future care 
and happiness? 

"Like as an earthly father pitieth his chil- 
dren," Jesus affirmed, is the love of our Father, 
God, for the human race. "I and my Father 
are one." "My Father worketh hitherto, and 
I work." These are some of the references 
made by Jesus to the relationship that he con- 
stantly asserted was established between his 
own soul and that of his Father, in the supernal 
world, and thus he taught his followers to pray : 
"Our Father which art in Heaven." This is 
the first recorded utterance of the modern 
shibboleth: "The Fatherhood of God and the 
Brotherhood of Man. ' ' In this now universally 
employed invocation, Jesus claimed for himself 
no other mention than that in which he in- 
structed all of earth's children to join. 

"Hallowed be thy name." In a sacred name 
there is power to hold the wavering thought; 
so may thy name be hallowed ! i. e., held sacred. 
It is affirmed that every created thing has a real 
appellation, a name given to it by its Creator. 
We pass through this rudimentary state of 
existence known as John or Mary, or by some 



ii«iit*i'»rl »»<!tS« •<<!<' vKSSJ lit 



164 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

other of the thousand or more titles in vogue 
that are indicative of different personalities; 
but it was long ago shown to an inspired 
teacher that, at a given point of development, 
each soul should be given its true name, a new 
one that should be "written in the forehead." 
Our Puritan progenitors had a dim perception 
of a higher and inner meaning to names. By 
calling their children Grace, Mercy, Patience, 
Charity, etc., they sought to embody spiritual 
principles. 

"Thy kingdom come." No heavenly king- 
dom can ever be ' l let down ' ' to the earth. The 
earthly must become developed and interpene- 
trated by the spiritual, and thus be lifted up 
into an harmonious co-relationship with the 
Divine. 

"Thy will be done on earth, as it is in 
heaven." There is but one will; so make it 
known to us that we may realize out at-one-ment 
with the Divine, even as do the "angels in 
heaven. ' 9 

"Give us this day our daily bread." "The 
earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof." 
(Make us partakers of thy bounty, that our 
bodies may have needed nourishment. Illumi- 
nate our spiritual understanding that we may 
take to ourselves each day such spiritual food 
as we are best fitted to appropriate and use.) 

"And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our 
debtors." Up to this point there is simply 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 165 

suggested the personal relationship between the 
petitioner and the Being to whom he prays; 
but into this phrase quite another element is 
introduced — a new factor; forgive us, as we in 
turn forgive our enemies. This puts upon one 
who utters these words the responsibility of 
answering his own prayer, or of making the 
conditions whereby he shall be forgiven and 
accepted, that thus may be established the 
eternal vibrations that bind the very lowest to 
the Highest. 

"And lead us not into temptation;" i. e., 
graciously protect us from following the devices 
of our own ignorance; but if we willfully go 
our own way, and are overcome with grief and 
disappointment because of our misdoing, 
"deliver us from [the] evil" consequences 
thereof, by inspiring our minds with courage 
to bear our pains and penalties with true 
heroism, and teach us through our experiences 
wherein lie our highest growth and wisdom for 
all our future lives. "For thine is the king- 
dom, and the power" to create and destroy, 
"and the glory." (All things begin and end in 
God.) "Forever and ever. Amen." 

Jesus had undoubtedly learned the pure 
ethics of this all-embracing appeal. Principles 
are unchanging; but, as the law of evolution 
carries each succeeding representation of the 
underlying facts of spiritual science ever higher 
in the ascending series, on the spiral path- 



rtfmHHMHKiHlHMt 



166 INSIGHTS AND HEKESIES 

way that leads to the kingdom of God, so in 
each is embodied a more advanced phase or 
externalization of such facts. The revelations 
vouchsafed to the world through the teachings 
of Confucius, Buddha, and other saviors of men 
appealed only to the intellect. Jesus was the 
first to announce to the heart-hungry that ' ' God 
so loved the world" that he sent one of his best 
beloved sons to bear witness to his own eternal 
love, and to show how all may become partic- 
ipators in its boundlessness. 

The potency of prayer corresponds to the 
power of the thought or to the exalted aspira- 
tion of the soul projecting it. There are some 
who, seeking divine aid, are too weak in this 
respect to realize any special results, while the 
prayers of others ascend as on the wings of 
eagles. This attitude of the soul is not to be 
confounded with the "communion of saints." 
Communion indicates the existence of a degree 
of equality which, in the relation of finite man 
with his Maker, cannot be. 

An occult wave has swept round the world. 
The seals are being broken, and the sphinxes 
are speaking wherever they find ears to hear 
and minds to comprehend. The heart of the 
mystery is this; there is no new thing to be 
proclaimed. "Spiritual things are spiritually 
discerned," and, with the divine illumination 
vouchsafed to all, "a wayfaring man, though 
a fool," may see and know the deep things of 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 167 

God. But no door will be opened, no angel or 
"minister of grace" or "spirit friend" will 
descend the ladder of light that leads to the 
realms supernal, no inspiration of God will ever 
come to any soul on earth without prayer — in 
response to either conscious supplication or 
unconscious aspiration toward the Giver of 
every good and perfect gift. The ultimate 
function and use of prayer is simply to estab- 
lish our relationship with the divine and ever- 
lasting forces that rule and guide our lives. 
These are ever operating to help us to live 
above the purely personal relationships that 
limit our growth and advancement along the 
lines of spiritual unfoldment, and to open to 
our souls vistas of perfectness on the higher 
planes of wisdom and understanding of the 
mysteries of immortal life. 

ABSURD BELIEFS. 

The supreme egotism of man has been largely 
corrected through the influence of education 
and experience which have made him conscious 
of the ridiculousness of his demands for recog- 
nition of his supremacy. Each one of those 
high, old eastern Emperors had to have his 
pedestal, and his title of god, without reference 
to his real character. Modern men do not 
expect to be real head-up gods. They know too 
much to be so ridiculous. But there are those 



IHillllliHIMIK 



168 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

who seem to feel that they are at least "little 
tin gods on wheels. ' ' 

When the Nazarene appeared among men 
possessing godlike qualities, it was entirely in 
line with the custom of the time to call him a 
god. There was neither logic nor common 
sense in the role Jesus was to play. He was 
God of all gods. He was, at the same time, the 
Only Begotten Son of God, and, as the idea of 
sacrifice to the numerous gods was an important 
part of the religious orgies of the time, they 
could only bring that into their new scheme for 
entrapping souls by making the Son — who was 
really God — a sacrifice to himself, to propitiate 
himself, and keep himself from utterly destroy- 
ing and damning the folks He himself had 
created. So they made it out that this good 
man should be a propitiation for the "sins of 
the race." Silly; improbable; unlawful; in- 
credible; impossible. The more useless and 
undeveloped people were, the more they 
believed that the sacrifice of a very God — to 
their egotistical minds — was not too much for 
the salvation of their infinitesimal, pinhead 
souls. 

THE BESURBECTION. 

It has been believed that dead folks stayed 
boxed up under ground waiting — ages perhaps 
— for the last trumpet to sound to call up the 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 169 

sleeping billions to the surface of the earth to 
the final ' ' day of judgment, ' ' when they should 
all swarm up out of their graves to be let to 
know by the great Judge of all to which class 
they belong, the "sheep" or the "goats" — - 
there was to be only those two kinds — sheep to 
go straight to heaven, all the others to be cast 
into hell fire to burn forever. The air would 
be full of toes and fingers and legs and heads 
coming from all directions to join themselves 
to the bodies from which they had been detached 
in their physical life; it was understood that 
in every case there would be no mistakes made, 
no white person, minus a member of his body 
in life, would find himself persistently chased 
up by arms or legs — especially by heads — of a 
different color, and form, from what he 
would know were his own; but, by some unac- 
countable magic, some divine law of attraction 
each dissevered member would instantly recog- 
nize its true belonging and fly to its former 
familiar location. Where this great final 
1 ' round up " is to be held has not yet been made 
known to the ' ' true believers. " " Chautauqua ' ' 
has been suggested, and also the lot back of 
the "White House" in Washington, D. C. 
There are objections, however, to these and some 
other places because of the limited area, but 
as "with God all things are possible" either 
spot might be made to answer. The great open- 
air university at Chautauqua is known every- 



iBaamnmatamtmmtftami 



imuttti\\ii)U 



170 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

where on earth — and possibly beyond — and cer- 
tainly would be a good point for the saints to 
hail from, in their upward journey, and the 
" White Lot" in Washington would shorten the 
journey for those who are booked for the trip 
in the other direction. 

Out of this belief has grown quite a little sect 
which takes it upon itself to decide upon the 
fate of all the world outside of its very limited 
number. It is hard upon the Methodists and 
Presbyterians and all the other cults and sects 
scattered about over the whole earth that they 
should all be doomed to everlasting hell fires 
because of a little difference of opinion with 
these self-elected judges ! The more insane of 
them have ignored all the claims of citizenship, 
have burned their fences and their barns, and 
given away all their earthly belongings, and 
refusing to be taught by the repeated failures 
of the many times set for the final ending of 
the planet, have donned their unbleached cotton 
"ascension robes," and have sat around on the 
hill-tops and waited long for the end of all 
things earthly, and the fun of seeing all the 
people who did not agree with them switched 
off into hell. 

The real beginning of this came from two 
sayings purported to have been the words of 
Christ. While hanging upon the cross a man 
nailed to another cross, begged Jesus to save 
him. Jesus was an adept, highly clairvoyant. 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 171 

He saw that the man was good — probably 
better than the people who had hung him there 
to die — and that if he was a thief, as they said, 
he had stolen things for the benefit of his 
people for food and for sandals and things for 
the family. So he said : ' ' This day yon shall 
be with me in the spirit world." Some clever 
person caught on to this and said to himself: 
"That settles it, if one man can go straight 
through without being laid up in the ground 
after death, all can." This view furnished an 
altogether different outlook and gave people a 
new idea of the law. Jesus assured his 
disciples that the kingdom of heaven would 
come on earth very soon, in fact, while they 
were yet alive. Well, he knew a lot about the 
soul, and immortality and all that, but nothing 
at all about evolution, or electricity, or what 
wonderful unfoldment of brain and magnificent 
works man should achieve. The Nazarene, like 
all seers and prophets, was simply mistaken in 
point of time. He did not give the Creator 
time enough to bring all things to pass, and if 
the people who think this world is actually 
coming to an end pretty soon would just think 
once that the Creator does not set things agoing 
solely for the purpose of destroying his work, 
and let him have his own way and time, they 
would save themselves much trouble. 



iti ttrnMiimMtiMtt mi 



172 



INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 



THE CREATOR. 

God — the all-creative Spirit — is the most 
positive element, or force in nature, and 
nothing is or can have existence in the external 
world that is not conceived and formed first in 
the matrix of the spirit. So it is in the realm 
of the invisible that the law of progress, of 
unending evolution takes its rise and becomes 
operative. Still, however clearly defined may 
be a truth, a law in the mentality of the higher 
powers, it can only be externalized to the degree 
comprehended by the mind through which it is 
given to the world. All that saves this world 
from being in a state of utter darkness is the 
fact that from its very beginning there have 
been souls capable of being illuminated by the 
light from the higher life, spirits so grounded 
in a faith in its certainties that they have shone 
out upon the stern and awful path trod by the 
human race like beacon lights above a stormy 
sea, or beaming stars shedding a calm radiance 
upon a trackless waste. 

RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE. 



We know so little of the mysteries of occult, 
divine law, and yet taking thought of the entire 
history of the human race, such as we have, 
and our own personal experience and observa- 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 173 

tion, we must recognize that there are certain 
fixed principles, certain laws, indicating the 
undying value of right living. To under- 
stand and apply these laws to the all around 
conduct of life, to the practical affairs of human 
effort, is in its highest, its spiritual sense the 
real business of earthly existence. Those 
religious teachers who have had a degree of 
spiritual enlightenment have wrapped up their 
perceptions of moral law, and disguised them 
with creeds and dogmas, and have used them 
to further their personal ambitions, and to hold 
their power over such people as they have been 
able to hypnotize into believing in them as the 
vice-gerents of the Most High. All this has 
been going on for long, and has been handed 
down through unnumbered generations until it 
has crystallized into forms and ceremonies, and 
unmoral conventionalities which stultify the 
race. "Dead loads" of good people believe 
they are doing God's service in trying to live 
up to these, never knowing how much they are 
the result of fanaticism and ignorance, and the 
concentrated intention of every sort of priests 
to keep their power over unthinking minds. 
Here and there, scattered along throughout the 
realms of intelligent being, there have always 
been noble and true men and women who have 
brought a sufficient comprehension of the out- 
working of the eternal principles of unswerving 
moral law to make their conduct of life here 



174 INSIGHTS AND HEKESIES 

wise and dependable, and to give to them the 
assurance of a successful continuance of indi- 
vidual life in other spheres of being, beyond 
earthly limitations. Those untrammelled souls 
who thus unfold grow up into an at-one-ment 
with the divine, all-pervading principle we call 
God. They have been, and are light bringers, 
and saviors of humanity. 

The perfection of individual character can 
only be achieved by determined effort, by 
unshrinking, concentrated labor. This simply 
means an acceptance of all the inevitable experi- 
ences incident to this life, coupled with a brave 
determination to wring from each and every 
one of them, good, or seemingly bad and unfor : 
tunate, all the lessons it can teach, and all 
the truth it can possibly reveal. This evolu- 
tion of the soul is from the innermost sacred 
precincts of the personality, and it is often 
unrecognized by those who have the most 
inclusive development of the attributes and 
innate resources of their own souls. 

Those people who are thus intent upon their 
souls' growth do not flaunt themselves in forms 
and ceremonies. Life is too short. The 
chief, the most important moral law is the law 
of justice, absolute unerring justice. This law 
is the very least comprehended of men, because 
its majesty, its even-handedness has been so 
misinterpreted, so travestied by various kinds 
of religious teachers, rulers, and self-appointed 



EVOLUTION" OF THE SOUL 175 

judges. Man-made laws which everywhere 
prevail tend always to segregate people into 
classes, producing results devoid of equity, 
favoring the materially superior. It is quite 
common for people who know nothing whatever 
of the operations of occult and spiritual law to 
ignore all responsibility for their unhappy 
earthly experiences, and " blame it all" on God. 
A child dies, the mother accuses God of making 
her the special subject of his unkindness in 
taking away from her the object of her love. 
Everywhere, among all classes of people this is 
not at all an unusual experience. The fact is, 
the prevailing ignorance of natural law — moral, 
spiritual law — is alone the cause of nearly all 
the misery of humanity. God has nothing 
whatever to do with it. There is this about it : 
there are the "eternal verities," the laws which 
speak ever to the consciousness of man, and 
whether they are broken in ignorance or will- 
fully set aside, the results are nearly the same ; 
the penalties exacted by beneficent justice are 
unalterable ; only in one case, there must finally 
be regrets for ignorance; in the other, great 
remorse for wickedness and ill-doing. But 
these results are not eternal, though the dread- 
fully cruel teachings of religion have made 
people believe so. The faintest stirrings of 
desire to be better, the least aspiration toward 
the higher life is sure of a response from loving, 
compassionate beings in angelic ministrations. 



[iLMIIIffmmiHmnkllMlMflllliMiMfHmi 



176 INSIGHTS AND HERESIES 

The priests of different religions who have 
been most valiant and positive in preaching hell 
fire and eternal damnation have entirely lost 
sight of this fact. Not the most strenuous of 
the whole lot has ever been able to follow one 
miserable wretch into the spirit world to find 
out whether his prognostications anent his 
hypnotized victims, have "come true." "Au 
contraire," great numbers of reputed sinners 
have come back in their real personality to 
report to their friends that there is no such fate 
for anyone, that it is one great lie. But it must 
not be supposed that there are no sure enough 
hells. There have to be places for the hellish 
to stay till they come of a better mind. Nature 
provides for them other opportunities for their 
gradual redemption through re-embodiments in 
the flesh on this earth. There is besides a 
constant outpouring from the dark abodes of 
estrayed and benighted souls, for the all-em- 
bracing love of our Father-Mother reaches 
even the horribly suffering lunatics, made so by 
their selfish, vicious lives here on earth. There 
is, indeed, the greatest possible difference 
between an intended eternal punishment of sin, 
such as has been preached for ages for the pur- 
pose of scaring people out of their wits, and a 
recognized, just retribution for broken law. 
Punishments such as have been believed in 
suggest a punisher, and our Father in heaven 
has been blasphemously represented as "angry 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 177 

with the wicked every day" and glad to have a 
chance to pour out his "bottles of wrath" on 
their elected heads. 

The torturing remorse of the slowly awaken- 
ing consciousness of those who have lived 
selfishly and viciously is far beyond the pains 
of the burning, material fires. Every human 
being that has in it a living germ of spirit shall 
be liberated and helped toward the light, not 
by any so-called personal redeemer — that is not 
possible — but by the power of its own aspiring 
soul, and even moderately decent folk shall 
come to enjoy all that they have imagined and 
longed for, and all great souls shall find the 
peace they have dreamed of. All souls every- 
where in the spirit world will have all they have 
truly earned in their earthly lives. 

While we stay here we are hardly protected 
from the envious thoughts and deeds of evilly 
disposed and vengeful people. Once safely 
landed in that superior and satisfactory realm 
no such invasions can reach us ever. 

THE SOUL. 

The soul is the vehicle of the spirit. It 
passes from the earthly life along with physical 
death, its uses ended. Developed by earthly 
experiences, it grows and has the power to 
detach itself and represent the personality of 
the individual to which it belongs, but only 



[mtmimiiiiiiMtitfiHiM 



178 INSIGHTS AND HEKESIES 

while on earth; it is not employed tlras after 
the spirit leaves the body. It is the "simil- 
acrum" of the body, and is often mistaken for 
the immortal part, the enfranchised spirit. 
But the spirit is generally unawakened and can 
only grow with the pabulnm of spiritual in- 
fluence, in harmony with spiritual law. It is 
this that complicates this life and retards the 
at-one-ment of the greatest of all trinities; 
body, soul and spirit, the natural three in one. 
The soul element is the bequest of the parents 
— especially of the mother — to their progeny. 
If the conditions are at all in harmony with 
divine law, the mother pours out all her soul's 
influence upon the forming body of her child in 
the divinest love ever manifested on earth. Its 
birth and manifestation are of the immortal 
spirit, and create in her offspring some con- 
sciousness of, some desire for immortality. Of 
all earthly phenomena this of motherhood is the 
most marvelous, and naturally the least under- 
stood, and the most slightingly regarded. Its 
universality reduces it to the commonplace. 



The conventionalities are not intended to keep 
people apart who really "belong" together and 
who ought to meet, but to protect those who 
wish to live good lives from the invasions of 
envious curiosity. 



EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL 179 



WOMAN. 

Woman is the constructive, the upbuilding 
force. With what patient endurance she awaits 
the slow growth of the bodies she shelters 
beneath her heart that are to hold souls here 
and give them human instruments with which 
to do their work on the material plane of life. 
In this sphere, the destructive jealousy of man 
of the power of woman does not avail, her 
kingdom is everlasting. Crushed and enslaved 
she is, and always has been, but only to gather 
to herself greater power. She is the natural 
lawgiver, the supreme ruler. Man, the intimate 
holder of the material forces, dreads the power 
of woman, and fears her invasions of his long- 
established rights in his chosen domain. 



Unwilling motherhood has filled the world 
with vice and crime. 

When men, women and children began to 
return to earth after physical death and give 
their recognized testimony to the fact of their 
spiritual resurrection, and of their continued 
real life with all its personal endowments 
exactly as they were here, the crude ideas of 
ignorant minds were forever set aside by 
millions who can now testify to the absolute 
truth of spirit return, instead of being buried 
in the earth waiting for an impossible time of 






180 



INSIGHTS AND HEEESIES 



reckoning and judgment. Do you call all this 
blasphemous ? Open your eyes. Look ! Listen ! 
Discriminate! Know where is the real, high 
blasphemy. "God bless us every one." 



ADIEU. 



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